Otto Rank and the Birth of Modern Psychotherapy, with Robert Kramer

Tue 17-01-2023, 19:00

We are delighted to announce our new lecture with Robert Kramer. For full description please go to: https://www.meetup.com/society-of-psychotherapy/events/290453129/

Among his most radical innovations in psychotherapy, Otto Rank was the first to locate the center of change in the creative will of his patients. In contrast, Freud always insisted that the an alyst’s interpretations were at the center of change. Pointing to Freud’s own self-centeredness, which was evident to anyone who knew him well, Rank drily remarked in Will Therapy: “Apparently the narcissism of the analyst has compensated for his passivity, so that he has related all reactions of the patient, as far as they do not permit of being put back on an infantile pattern, to his own person.” Instead, said Rank, he was choosing to place the client “as chief actor, in the center of the situation.”

In a Copernican turn, Rank shifted the source of therapeutic results from the helper to the person being helped. “Rank moved out of the classical tradition,” said Jessie Taft, Rank's close friend, “into a completely reversed conception of the role of the therapist as secondary, leaving to the patient the active role of the creator in the therapeutic process.”

Founder of humanistic psychology, Carl Rogers would later reveal that, after a three day workshop with Rank in 1936, he began to see, for the first time, “the possibilities of the individual being self-directing.” Although Rogers rarely used Rank’s term “creative will,” his focus after meeting Rank increasingly became client-centered, for the same reason that Rank gave: “Rogers discovered that a self-propelled process arises from inside,” said Eugene Gendlin, In 1929, at Yale University, Rank had pointed to “this inner self of the individual … that is impelling, that is not taken from without but grows somehow from within.”

According to Rank, it is the quality of the relationship, not an interpretation offered by the therapist, that allows a patient’s creative will, buried under inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety, to emerge. The therapist serves as a “midwife” for the re-birth of a person. Being together in an empathic relationship – not the giv ing of knowledge – is the locus of transformation. Relationship takes priority over insight. “Even simple therapeutic action,” argued Rank in 1924 in The Trauma of Birth, “can be arrested by too much knowledge and too much insight.” The giving of insight, whether accu rate or not, may distract from, or block, feelings and encounter in the moment. The patient needs understanding, not an interpretation, no matter how ingeniously formulated. Rank created modern psychotherapy by placing relationship, not interpretation, at the center of healing.

Bio:
Robert Kramer, PhD, is Visiting Professor of Psychology at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, and a practicing Rankian psychoanalyst, the only one in the world. He has published in The CEU Review of Books (Budapest), The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times of Israel (Tel Aviv), and The New European (London). During academic year 2015-16, he was the inaugural International Chair of Public Leadership at the National University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary. In 2016 he resigned his chair in protest against the corruption of the Orbán regime.

His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals in the U.S., the U.K. and, in translation, in Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Spain. His latest article, "Discovering the Existential Unconscious: Rollo May Encounters Otto Rank" (The Humanistic Psychologist, in press, 2022) has been published in translation in Chinese and Russian, and is now being translated into Greek, Turkish and Hungarian. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (US), founded by Abraham Maslow.
He edited and introduced Otto Rank's A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures (Princeton University Press, 1996) and co-edited, with E. J. Lieberman, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). His most recent book is The Birth of Relationship Therapy: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank (Giessen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2022). He is now writing the 2023 afterword (entitled "Ernest Becker and the Rankian Century") for the 50th anniversary edition of Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, which won the Pulitzer prize in 1974. His next book, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2023, is entitled, Otto Rank and the Creation of Modern Psychotherapy.

Tickets are £6 and you can get a CPD certificate on request.

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