THE BIRTH OF CLIENT-CENTERED THERAPY: CARL ROGERS, OTTO RANK, AND ”THE BEYOND”
ROBERT KRAMER teaches executive leadership at American University in Washington DC. (kramer at-american.edu). He is an internationally recognized authority on action learning and consults on leadership development to organizations worldwide. He is editor of A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures of Otto Rank (Princeton University Press, 1996) and co-editor, with E. James Lieberman, of The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
Summary
Carl Rogers is one of the most influential figures in humanistic psychology. Surprisingly, however, almost no one knows the full story of how he came to develop client-centered therapy. Yet Rogers always acknowledged that a personal encounter with Otto Rank in 1936 revolutionized the way he thought about psychotherapy. ”I became infected with Rankian ideas,” he told his biographer. Like Rank, whose last book was entitled Beyond Psychology, Rogers concluded by the end of his life that there is a realm ”beyond” scientific psychology, a realm he came to prize as ”the transcendent, the indescribable, the spiritual.” Ironically, the spiritual had always been there, hidden in what was closest and most familiar to Rogers: the empathic relationship between therapist and client. The spirit of Otto Rank, from whom client-centered therapy originated, lived on in the mind, heart, and soul of Carl Rogers.
Carl Rogers always acknowledged that the thought of Otto Rank inspired him more than any other, early on, when he was still doing therapy in the old-fashioned ”directive” way. Scholars duly note a link between Rank and Rogers, usually with a perfunctory nod to one or another of Rank’s ideas, such as ”will” or ”relationship therapy” (Gendlin, 1988; Raskin,
1948; Sollod, 1978). But almost
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no one has considered this link to be worthy of much more than a footnote in the history of psychology. Recently, however, while editing a collection of Rank’s American lectures, I became curious about the relationship between Rogers and Rank. I knew that Rogers had a personal encounter with Rank in 1936, but just how close, philosophically and intellectually, were they?
To my astonishment, I discovered traces of Rank’s ideas throughout Rogers’s mature work, not only in the 1930s, at the birth of client-centered therapy, but also much later, in the 1970s, at the emergence of a deeply spiritual Rogers. Like spirit itself, however, these traces of Rank in Rogers are barely visible. For those who have not read Rank, the traces may in fact be invisible. In the course of developing his own original and powerful thinking, Rogers himself seems not to have been fully aware of just how much of Rank’s thought and vocabulary he was echoing. Yet, after reading them both side by side, I cannot escape the uncanny feeling that the spirit of Rank is present, hovering in the white space between the lines of Rogers’s text. And every now and then, if we pay close attention to the language Rogers favored—especially his metaphors—it rises to the surface and speaks in the voice of Otto Rank.
By teasing out Rogers’s close affinity with Rank, however, I do not intend to diminish in the slightest the genius of Carl Rogers, whose contribution to psychology is extraordinary. For me and countless others in the helping professions, Rogers remains, without exaggeration, ”the most influential psychologist in American history” (Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989a, p. xi).
”THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR READING RANK”
The last 20 years have seen a remarkable renewal of interest in the work of Otto Rank, the former protege of Freud who so revolutionized the thinking of Carl Rogers. Brutally attacked by orthodox analysts for abandoning Freud’s teachings, Rank, according to more than one estimate, ”will probably turn out in the end to have been the best mind that psychoanalysis contributed to intellectual history” (J. Jones, 1960, p. 219). As just one example, in literary studies published during 1992, Rank was cited as often as Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott, and far more than R. D. Laing, Roland Barthes, or Noam Chomsky (Hudson, 1992).
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The Rankian revival began in 1973 with Ernest Becker’s (1973) Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Denial of Death, a brilliant merger of Rank’s post-Freudian writings with the thought of Kierkegaard. A return to Rank was vital, argued Becker, to afford psychoanalysis a theory of creativity as compelling as Freud’s theory of sexuality. ”There is no substitute for reading Rank,” said Becker, ”he is a mine for years of insights and pondering” (p. xii).
In 1982, Esther Menaker, a member of the board of The Psychoanalytic Review, published the first comprehensive treatment of Rank’s ideas. Rank, she concluded, was the unacknowledged forerunner of ego psychology as well as of the object-relations theories of W.R.D. Fairbairn and Margaret Mahler (Menaker, 1982). In 1985, E. James Lieberman wrote the first full-scale biography of Rank, based on dozens of interviews with those who knew Rank. Following the pioneering research of Paul Roazen (1974), Lieberman uncovered a host of lies in Ernest Jones’s treatment of Rank in Volume 3 of his Freud biography. ”The truth about Rank himself can scarcely be found in print,” said Lieberman, who was amazed at the abundance of errors concerning Rank’s life and work in the literature of psychology (Lieberman, 1985, p. xv).
There are exceptions. Rollo May and Irvin Yalom, two leading existential psychologists, credit Rank as the most important precursor of existential psychotherapy (May, 1983; Schneider & May, 1995; Yalom, 1980). Paul Goodman was deeply affected by Rank, going so far as to describe Rank’s writings on art and creativity as ”beyond praise” in Gestalt Therapy (Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951, p. 395). ”Rank hit on the creative act as psychological health itself,” concluded Goodman (Perls et al., 1951, p. 237). While constructing the theoretical basis for Gestalt, Goodman leaned heavily on Rank, whose ”formulation [of the Tiere and now*],” according to Goodman’s biographer, ”has the therapeutic moment in view more explicitly than any other” (Stoehr, 1994, p. 126). Many members of the board of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, including Stanislav Grof, Charles Hampden-Turner, Floyd Matson, Clark Moustakas, Kirk Schneider, Dene Serlin, and M. Brewster Smith, also acknowledge Rank.
Of all those mentioned, however, Rollo May is perhaps the closest philosophically to Rank, by virtue of their common interest in wrestling with and celebrating the meanings of myth, art, love, will, anxiety, guilt, and, in May’s unforgettable term, the daimonic element of human nature (May, 1969, p. 123). ”I have long consid-
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ered Rank to be the great unacknowledged genius in Freud’s circle,” Rollo May wrote to me shortly before his death in October 1994.
What is it about Rank’s ideas that has touched so many humanistic and existential psychologists? Vastly erudite, steeped in mythology, the classics, anthropology, world literature, and philosophy— Western and Eastern—Rank presents a formidable challenge to modern psychologists with little exposure to the arts and humanities. Where to begin? The best way to understand Rank’s complex ideas may come from a source no one has yet considered: Carl Rogers, whose personal and moving writings are universally admired for their clarity and grace. For this reason, I would like to start by relating the virtually unknown story of a deep sharing in 1936 between a young American therapist and a famous Viennese psychologist excommunicated a decade earlier from Freud’s inner circle for heresy.
I want to reveal as fully as I can the attunement between these two kindred souls, so different in culture and background, yet so similar in their grasp of psychology and the value of empathic understanding for affirming the creative will of human beings. Then, by taking the experience of empathy to its deepest level, I want to lead us on a journey to the border of a realm beyond scientific psychology, to the shores of the ineffable, the numinous, an other-worldly realm that Rogers, just before he died, came to prize as ”the transcendent, the indescribable, the spiritual1’ (Thome, 1992, p. 22). This is a realm in which human beings may find themselves face-to-face with the Unknown and the Unknowable, ”negotiating,” said Rank (1932/1989) in his masterpiece Art and Artist, ”with the problem of the Beyond” (p. 49). Here, if we are truly open to the awe and majesty that awaits us at the core of empathy, we may rediscover the spiritual meaning of art and love, and perhaps just as important, be reminded of the improbability, the sheer strangeness—the tragicomic absurdity—of existence itself.
OTTO RANK AND THE ”BIRTH” OF CLIENT-CENTERED THERAPY
What was the setting for Carl Rogers’s encounter with Otto Rank? In the 1920s and 1930s, the field of American psychotherapy was dominated by those who stressed ”techniques” to maintain control of the interview and to direct patients toward therapist-
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chosen objectives—such as the adoption of socially approved goals. Following the medical model, the emphasis was on diagnosing and fixing a ”problem” of the patient—who had an illness that needed to be ”treated,” hence the name ”patient.” Few therapists were concerned with the patient’s subjective experience, which was considered irrelevant for medical treatment. And almost no one paid attention to the ”here and now” interpersonal relationship inside the consulting room (Kramer, 1995b).
From 1928 through 1939, Carl Rogers served as a therapist at the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, in Rochester, New York—his first professional position after studying psychology at Columbia University, where he had been drawn to adopt ”a rigorous scientific approach allied to a coldly objective statistical methodology” (Thome, 1992, p. 7). Not entirely satisfied with being trained just in research, Rogers was also exposed during his Columbia years to clinicians practicing Freudian psychoanalysis. ”If Rogers favored any one deep, therapeutic approach when he came to Rochester,” writes his biographer, ”it was ’interpretive therapy’ the major goal of which is to help the child or parent achieve insight into his own behavior and motives, past and present” (Rirschenbaum, 1979, p. 86, italics added).
On his staff at the Rochester clinic were a number of social workers trained at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Work, in Philadelphia, where Otto Rank had been lecturing since 1926, after being banished from Freud’s inner circle for publishing The Trauma of Birth (1924/1994). In this book, Rank overturned the fundamental tenets of the psychoanalytic movement by proposing that the child’s pre-OedipaJ relationship to its mother was the prototype of the therapeutic relationship between analyst and patient (Kramer, 1955a).
Rank delivered the manuscript of The Trauma of Birth to Freud as a birthday present in May 1923, with a personal dedication. At first half-receptive to Rank’s new idea, Freud accepted the dedication with an ambiguous quote from Horace: ”Non omnis moriar”— which means ”I shall not completely die” (Lieberman, 1985, p. 202). Soon thereafter, however, he turned strongly against the book. The Trauma of Birth gave Freud a ”shock of alarm,” according to Ernest Jones (1957), ”lest the whole of his life’s work on the etiology of the neurosis be dissolved” (p. 59). By elevating the role of mother over that of father, Rank was undermining the causal significance of the Oedipus complex.
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In June 1936, intrigued by social workers who were telling him that ”relationship therapy”—not ”interpretive therapy”—was the emphasis of the Philadelphia School, Carl Rogers invited Otto Rank to Rochester to conduct a 3-day seminar on his new, postFreudian practice of therapy (Evans, 1975, p. 28). No longer calling himself a psychoanalyst, Rank was by 1936 a ”world-renowned psychologist whose major works could be read in English, French and German” (lieberman, 1985, p. 355). In 1935, Rank had spoken at Harvard at the invitation of Henry Murray (p. 363), then the preeminent American student of ”personology.”
What did Rogers learn during this June 1936 seminar? No one can be certain, but one month after visiting Rochester, in July 1936, Rank published two books: Will Therapy: An Analysis of the Therapeutic Process in Terms ofRelationship (193671978b) and Truth and Reality: A Life History of the Human Will (1936/1978a). The titles reveal Rank’s fundamental concerns: creativity and relationship. Although densely written, these books offer his richest thinking in response to a riddle Freud struggled with for a lifetime but could never solve: What, precisely, is the human meaning of the therapeutic relationship?
’THE REAL I, OR SELF WITH ITS OWN POWER, THE WILL, IS LEFT OUT
Originally delivered as a series of lectures in the late 1920s at the Philadelphia School, Will Therapy (Rank, 1936/1978b) and Truth and Reality (Rank, 1936/1978a) criticized Freud for reducing the creative impulse to a mere vicissitude of the sex drive, for failing to recognize what Rank was calling the creative will. Psychoanalysis could not explain how from the sex drive there was produced not sexuality but the art work. Sublimation, an ”insipid and impotent concept [that] prolongs a shadowy existence in psychoanalysis” (Rank, 1936/1978a, p. 5), could never bridge the infinite gap from sex to art. Who or what was actually doing the work of sublimation? ”An inexplicable ’remainder’had therefore to be admitted,” said Rank (1932/1989) in Art and Artist, ”but this remainder embraced no more and no less than the whole problem of artistic creativity* (p. 63, italics added).
Human consciousness, Rank said, cannot be fully comprehended or explained by the ”causality” of the natural or social
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sciences. Not a derivative of biology, consciousness ”is only to be understood phenomenologically,” Rank told his Philadelphia students. ”One might say that in the psychical sphere there are no facts, but only interpretations of facts” (Rank, in press). It is ”only in the individual act of will,” said Rank (1936/1978b), that Ve have the unique phenomenon of spontaneity, the establishing of a new primary cause” (p. 44). And with the emergence of consciousness— especially self-consciousness, that is, the full awareness of self— the human being begins ”a new series of causes” (p. 44).
In The Trauma of Birth, said Rank, he had referred to ”the creation of the individual himself, not merely physically, but also [spiritually] in the sense of the ’rebirth experience/which I understand … as the actual creative act of the human being.” A creature born out of a biological mother, out of a speck of cosmic dust, ”the human being,” continued Rank, ”becomes at once creator and creature or actually moves from creature to creator, in the ideal case, creator of himself, his own personality” (Rank, 1936/1978a, p. 2). The development of consciousness and ”the never completed birth of individuality,” according to Rank, seemed ”somehow to correspond to a continued result of births, rebirths and new birth, which reach from the birth of the child from the mother, beyond the birth of the individual from the mass, to the birth of creative work from the individual and finally to the birth of knowledge from the work” (pp. 11-12).
The essence of life and consciousness is ceaseless change. Individuation is never complete. Freud’s rigidly deterministic theory, which reduced all experience to a disguised permutation of sexuality, corresponded ”to a longing after a firm hold, after something constant, at rest, in the flight of psychic events” (Rank, 1936/1978a, p. 10). As a result, ”the real I, or self with its own power, the will, is left out” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 113). The aim of his new postFreudian therapy, said Rank (1936/1978a), is ”self-development” (p. 20). The word develop comes from the Latin devolvere, which means to unfold, unveil, cause to grow or bring into fuller view, to make visible that which is invisible—like a photograph developing out of its chemical solution. Simply put, continued Rank, this meant that ”the person is to develop himself into that which he is” (p. 20)—a theme that Carl Rogers later made central to his work.
Neurosis is not a failure in sexuality, according to Rank, but a failure in creativity: a refusal to affirm oneself as an individual, to accept the strange and unfathomable existence forced on us at
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birth. ”It is self-willed,” said Rank in a 1935 lecture, ”a sort of creation that can find expression only in this negative, destructive way* (Rank, in press). Willing expresses itself uniquely for each living being. Will is the subjective experience of living itself, a continuous process of agency that, paradoxically, may elect to deny itself—deny that an actor or agent is even present. Both constructive and destructive, will is expressed in creation or lost in neurotic symptoms, that is, self-destruction. ”This evaluation of illness as an expression of the individual creative force leads to a wholly different conception of the neurotic . . . [who] unites in himself potentially the possibilities of destructiveness as well as of creativeness” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 160). In a sense, neurosis is the outcome of willing the spontaneous—life itself. The neurotic wills himself or herself unfree, thus perverting the life force itself into its own denial. The neurotic is ”a personality denying its own will, not accepting itself as an individual” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 49). Unable to affirm his or her own difference, the suffering person hurls a ”Big No” at the full awareness of living. Strangely, human beings seem to have been granted the freedom to ”transform will to not-willing” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 153). Although a ”creative achievement” (Rank, 1936/1978a, p. 4), the neurosis is a form of ”negative will” on the part of a person who denies himself or herself because of excessive guilt for separation and individuation, because of excessive anxiety over the ”consciousness of living” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 41)—that is, sheer difference itself.
A ”biologist of the mind” (Sulloway, 1979), Freud always insisted that the difference between male and female is ”biological bedrock.” Although not disputing the force of biology or the sex difference, Rank, like Rogers and the existentialists, peered below biological bedrock to confront the ontological, or better the preontological, mystery of Being itself: that is, the awesome difference— the ineffable difference—between nonexistence and existence. ”The mere fact of difference” according to Rank (1936/1978b), ”in other words, the existence of our own will as opposite, unlike, is the basis for the [self-] condemnation which manifests itself as inferiority or guilt feeling” (p. 56, italics added). In the existential sense, therefore, guilt ”is simply a consequence of consciousness, or more correctly, it is the self-consciousness of the individual as of one willing consciously” (Rank, 1936/1978a, p. 32).
Rank did not minimize the enormous significance of the anatomical difference between the sexes. This difference, however, is
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the second most important difference the child confronts. ”First comes the perception of difference from others as a consequence of becoming conscious of self… then interpretation of this difference as inferiority . . . finally association of this psychological conflict with the biological sexual problem, the difference of the sexes” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 55). The difference between nonexistence and existence precedes and colors all other difference—whether it be the difference of sex, age, race, intelligence, or nationality. Existence comes first. According to Rank, ”The fundamental problem is individual difference, which the I is inclined to interpret as inferiority unless it can be proved by achievement to be superiority” (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 42). Only through creative production—in art, philosophy, or science, for example—can the pain of living be eased and the strange gift of life justified.
”Neurosis,” suggested Rank (1936/1978b), ”is a facing on the part of the individual of the metaphysical problems of human existence, only he faces them not in a constructive way as does the artist, philosopher or scientist, but destructively” (p. 127, italics added). At bottom, ”the real causal factor of the neurosis consists in the fact that we have a psychical life” (Rank, in press)—in the strange awareness that we are alive. Rank came to call this ”the reality problem,” which, he said in Will Therapy, ”is nothing but the problem of the present, in other words the consciousness of living. The tendency to get free of it”—that long malaise, our difference—”is perhaps the strongest psychic force in the individual, as it manifests itself in striving after happiness and salvation” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 41).
Living in the present—being present—is not so easy. Male or female, the human being is tormented by a question that science with all its great achievements cannot answer: What does it mean to be conscious during this brief interval, a holiday on earth, between two eternities of darkness? Not a ”black box” in the mind whose ”contents” can be uncovered and repackaged by analysis, the unconscious is utterly shrouded in darkness. The unconscious is before Oedipus; before pre-Oedipus. The unconscious, according to Rank, is an infinite past stretching backwards into the impenetrable coldness of space and time ”before” our sudden arrival on the planet and forwards into an equally infinite icy abyss looming ”after” our death. Emerging at conception from oblivion, and returning at death to oblivion, we are astounded by the eerie similarity of the two dark holes called ”before” and ”after.”
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Human beings are thrown into the world at birth and thrown out at death. But not only do we forget that we are born to die, we also have an astonishing ability to forget that we are living. Enigmatically, our conscious awareness of Dasein—German for being there—appears to have suffered a much deeper repression than even the repression of Oedipal sexual wishes or pre-Oedipal deficits in the development of self. Are we not forever in debt to another or an ”Other*—someone or something outside ourselves— for our very existence? Tb be sure, Rank acknowledged both Oedipal and pre-Oedipal guilt, but he observed that they are surplus guilt; they come on top of an already present existential indebtedness: ”We are not our own,” said Rank (1936/1978b), ”no matter whether we perceive the guilt religiously toward God, socially toward the father, or biologically toward the mother” (p. 101, italics added). Neither God, nor father, nor mother is the primary cause of our pain. It is ordinary living—mere consciousness—that is painful.
Were we to rip away all our psychological defenses, were we to truly and profoundly let sink into our hearts and minds the awesome incomprehensibility of the strange consciousness forced on us, without our consent, would we not go raving mad with terror and anxiety? Would we not be ”reborn into madness” (Becker, 1973, p. 66)? This painful condition, portrayed unforgettably in Edvard Munch’s late-19th-century masterpiece The Scream, a shattering portrayal of anxiety, is what Rank called ”neurosis,” a condition that he believed affects all self-conscious mortals to one degree or another.
Refraining the economic metaphor so central to Freud’s drive theory, Rank concluded that the neurotic ”bribes” life itself—for which we all have to ”pay” with death. Because of extreme guilt and anxiety, the neurotic hurls a Big No at living: ”He refuses the loan” of life, said Rank (1936/1978b), ”in order thus to escape the payment of the debt”—death (p. 126). Continuously striving to ward off dying, the neurotic only hastens death, ”from which he seeks to buy himself free by daily partial self-destruction” (p. 126). Tragically, we cannot escape the payment even if we refuse the loan.
Why is it so hard for human beings to bear the burden of selfhood, the pain of individuation, the anxiety of standing up and accepting full responsibility for one’s self—one’s difference? At the core of suffering, according to Rank, is angst—anxiety, anguish, or
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dread. Even with the kindest of parents, and the least violent of births, the human being is born afraid, a shivering bundle of anxiety cast adrift in an awesome and uncaring Cosmos. Angst ”seems to be erected as a dividing line between the I and the world, and vanishes only when both have become one, as parts of a greater whole” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 198)—in, for example, art or love. I = suffering. Difference = angst. Unlike castration fear, which is partial, birth fear is ”more universal, cosmic as it were, loss of connection with a greater whole, in the last analysis with the ’all’” (p. 124). Not ordinary fear, which is directed realistically toward an object, such as mother or father, the angst that ”appears in consequence of individualization, is the fear of being alone, of loneliness, the loss of the feeling of kinship with others, finally with the ALL” (p. 155).
This is anxiety for existence itself—from the Latin, ex-sistere: to come forth. Emerging from a germ cell smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, the human being spends a lifetime trying to heal its sense of painful alienation and aloneness, its sheer difference. Everything is profoundly cracked. With birth, the feeling of oneness with ”the ALL” is lost. It is only the glue of art or love that can bind our broken parts together, make us whole again, if only for a fleeting moment. I = pain. Only through art or love can the individual be ”delivered from his isolation and become part of a greater and higher whole” (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 86). The creation of a neurosis, in these terms, is an unsuccessful attempt to solve the ”part-whole problem” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 134)—which, Rank speculated, may simply be another name for the fear of life and the fear of death.
”FEAR OF LIFE … FEAR OF DEATH”
The painful emotion of angst divides into two currents, according to Rank, running in opposite directions: one toward separation and individuation; the other toward union and collectivity. The outbreak of neurosis typically comes from the streaming together of these two fears—which Rank also called the ”fear of living” and the ”fear of dying.” A crisis ”seems to break out at a certain age when the life fear which has restricted the ego development meets with the death fear as it increases with growth and maturity,” said Rank (1936/1978b). ”The individual then feels himself driven for-
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ward by regret for wasted life and the desire to retrieve it. But this forward driving fear is now death fear, the fear of dying without having lived, which, even so, is held in check by fear of life” (pp. 188-189).
The fear of life is the fear of separation and individuation. The fear of death is the fear of union and merger—in essence, the loss of individuality. Both separation and union, however, are desired as well as feared because the ”will to separate” correlates with the creative impulse and the ”will to unite” with the need for love. Tb respond obsessively just to one need—by choosing to separate ”totally* or to merge ”totally”—is to have the other fear thrown back at one’s self:
The fear in birth, which we have designated as fear of life, seems to me actually the fear of having to live as an isolated individual, and not the reverse, the fear of loss of individuality (death fear). That would mean, however, that primary fear corresponds to a fear of separation from the whole, therefore a fear of individuation, on account of which I would like to call it fear of life, although it may appear later as fear of the loss of this dearly bought individuality, as fear of death, of being dissolved again into the whole. Between these two fear possibilities, these poles of fear, the individual is thrown back and forth all his life, which accounts for the fact that we have not been able to trace fear back to a single root, or to overcome it therapeutically. (Rank, 193671978b, p. 124)
The angst-ridden neurotic hurtles from one extreme to the other, unable to find a constructive balance between individuation and merger, separation and union, differentiation and connectedness, I and Thou:
Here psychotherapy enters as a binding function… which offers to the patient in the person of the analyst, the ”thou” from whom he had estranged himself in self-willed independence. That this ”thou” then so easily becomes the ”all” for the patient. . . constitutes the most difficult aspect of the neurotic type, which is formed on the all or nothing psychology so that either aspect has for him a death meaning, that is, tends to unleash fear. (p. 155)
It does not seem possible, said Rank, to eradicate these two ”ultimate” anxieties, which appear to be a burden carried out of the womb by every new arrival on the planet. Sometimes it is fear of life—the fear of becoming and being oneself, separate and different from everyone else—that has the upper hand. At other times, it is fear of death—the fear of merging into the other, into the collective, and losing one’s ”dearly bought individuality”—that
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predominates. The eternal conflict between the wish for and fear of separation, and the wish for and fear of union, has no final solution. It must be solved and re-solved continuously throughout life, at every developmental stage, ”from birth, via childhood and puberty to maturity and from there downward through old age to death” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 134), which is simultaneously the final separation and the final union. ”It can only be a matter of balance between the two, which, however, is not attained once and for all but must be created anew and ever anew” (p. 91). Whereas there is no final solution to this dilemma, the ”part-whole” problem, some solutions are healthier than others.
MACROCOSM VERSUS MICROCOSM
No one has expressed the conflict between the will to separate and the will to unite better than Ernest Becker, whose awardwinning The Denial of Death captured the largest—macrocosmic— meaning of separation and union for Rank:
On the one hand the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic forces, to merge himself with the rest of nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart. (Becker, 1973, pp. 151-152)
You can see that man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can’t stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can’t allow the complete suffocation of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof, (p. 155)
On a microcosmic level, however, the lifelong oscillation between the two ”poles of fear” can be made more bearable, according to Rank, in a relationship with another person who accepts one’s uniqueness and difference, and allows for the emergence of the creative impulse—without too much guilt or anxiety for separating from the other. Living fully requires ”seeking at once isolation and union” (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 86), finding the courage to accept both simultaneously, without succumbing to the angst that leads a person to be whipsawed from one pole to the other. Creative solutions for living emerge out of the fluctuating, ever-expanding and ever-contracting, space between isolation and union. Art and the creative impulse, said Rank in Art and Artist (1932/1989),
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”originate solely in the constructive harmonization of this fundamental dualism of all life” (p. xxii).
Like angst, the creative impulse itself seems to divide into two currents: ”Will and guilt,” said Rank (1936/1978a), in one of his most important learnings, ”are the two complementary sides of one and the same phenomenon” (p. 31, italics added). Will and guilt are doubles. One can never speak of willing without guilt feeling, for they are of a single piece, infusing and shaping each other. It is the never-ending ebb and flow of these emotional currents, for good or evil, that gives music, color, poetry, and drama to human existence, a hymnal of creativity and suffering. If freedom is doing whatever one wants, not every want will do. Will and guilt define the greatness and limits of a flesh-and-blood mortal, simultaneously creator and creature, artist and worm, whose awareness of Dasein is split,
wavering between his Godlikeness and nothingness, whose will is awakened to knowledge of its power [but] whose consciousness is aroused to terror before it. The heroic myth strives to justify this creative will through glorifying its deeds, while religion reminds man that he himself is but a creature dependent on cosmic forces (p. 31).
On a macrocosmic level, the consciousness of living—the dim awareness that we are alive for a moment on this planet as it spins, meaninglessly, around the cold and infinite galaxy—gives human beings *i;he status of a small god in nature,” according to Ernest Becker (1973):
Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still has the gill marks to prove it…. Man is literally split in two: he has awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. (p. 26)
Because of the ”will-guilt problem,” as Rank (in press) came to call this ”great conflict between our biological and purely human self,” the I—even with its powerful creative will—is not master in its own house, on either the microcosmic or macrocosmic level. I am simultaneously a maker of destiny and an object of fate, a creator
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68 Rogers, Rank, and ”The Beyond”
of art and a creature of biological forces forever beyond my ken, a master and a servant.
Although a necessary part of growth, separation and individuation have an emotional price: ”The more we individualize ourselves—that is, remove and isolate ourselves from others—the stronger is the formation of guilt-feeling that originates from this individualization, and that again in turn unites us emotionally with others” (Rank, in press). Guilt springs not only from unconscious sexual desires, as Freud insisted, but, far more important, from individuation itself, the consciousness of living, from being a part that was forced at birth to separate from a whole. In short, guilt springs from difference. Guilt ”springs from our own willing,” said Rank (1936/1978b), ”which does not stop at the death blow to the father and the sexual conquest of the mother” (p. 50). Willing = suffering. Difference = guilt. To say, ”I am” is also to say aI am, to some degree, guilty.” Only when will and guilt are in balance—a balance that must be constantly adjusted and re-adjusted as life unfolds—can the dance of creativity and connection begin anew.
However, the human being who has failed to separate and individuate also feels guilt—a kind of thrown-back responsibility or debt to life—for remaining embedded in ”the Other,” submerged in the womb of the collective, ”being buried alive” (p. 148). In German, ”guilty” is denoted by the word schuldig—which means ”being in debt.” Not an ordinary sense of obligation, schuldig points to a much deeper guilt than the Oedipal or pre-Oedipal guilt uncovered by psychoanalysis. For Rank, this ”indebtedness” is an ontological guilt for ”unused life, the unlived in us” (p. 149), guilt for self-betrayal: for refusing the burden of consciousness, of difference, for denying the vital need for growth. In a state of partial suicide, the individual nevertheless ”will not let himself forget that he still lives, although he has the feeling of being dead” (p. 148). One cannot avoid life even by throwing it away.
”NEGOTIATING WITH THE PROBLEM OF THE BEYOND”
Paradoxically, great artists—those rare human beings, whether painters, scientists, writers, or philosophers, who experience and express difference (or the creative impulse) to the ultimate—also feel a profound uneasiness for taking on the largest burden, creat-
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Robert Kramer 69
ing a whole world in their own image, for rivaling the creative force of the Cosmos itself, for ”negotiating” as mere mortals ”with the problem of the Beyond9* (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 49, italics added).
In a macrocosmic sense, artists like Michelangelo and Shakespeare, scientists like Newton and Einstein, philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, struggle with all their emotional energies and creativity to wrest a sliver of human meaning out of the mysterium tremendum (Otto, 1923/1950, pp. 12-24), the unfathomable mystery of creation. They absorb into themselves, as a personal problem to be solved, nothing less than the entire Cosmos.
With an eye fixed on all creation, the great artist, according to Rank (193671978a), ”creates a whole world in his own image, and then needs the whole world to say ’yes1 to his creation, to find it good and thus to justify it” (p. 68). But what mortal’s ”creation of an own individual cosmos” (p. 12) can rival the majesty and splendor of nature, the brilliant blue skies and waters of the Aegean, the giant redwoods of California, the vast mountain ranges of the Himalayas, the awesome beauty of a single dandelion? The responsibility for creating ”a new cosmos” is too much to bear on one person’s shoulders, no matter how large. Even human genius is not enough for such a grandiose project, which accounts for the profound and honest humility of scientists of monumental stature like Newton and Einstein. Rank’s view that the highest form of creativity leaves guilt in its wake is found nowhere else in the psychoanalytic literature. In Truth and Reality (1936/1978a), he said, perhaps in part autobiographically:
The creative type must constantly make good his continuous will expression and will accomplishment and he pays for this guilt toward others and himself with work which he must give to the others and which justifies himself to himself. Therefore he is productive, he accomplishes something because he has real guilt to pay for, not imaginary guilt like the neurotic, who only behaves as if he were guilty but whose consciousness of guilt is only an expression of his will denial, not of creative accomplishment of will, which makes one truly guilty, (p. 67; italics added)
By the most intense act of creating, great artists, consciously or unconsciously, strive toward spiritual freedom and the illusion of immortality, to make themselves independent of the compulsions of sex and death, of the inexorable will of nature—reaching toward the fantasy of causa-sui: pure independence (Becker, 1973, p. 107). But the project to create oneself—to be one’s own parent, so to
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70 Rogers, Rank, and ”The Beyond”
speak—is confronted with the existential limits mandated by biology, because death and bodily destruction await us all, artist or neurotic, hero or coward, master or servant. Rank never forgot the impossibility of the causa-sui project, even while exploring with subtlety its dynamics as a spur to the creative urge and artistic illusion. Not a prophet of pain-free self-actualization or the mindless exercise of willpower, Rank (1932/1989) analyzed the dialectic between freedom and determinism, will and guilt, independence and dependence most acutely in his masterpiece, Art and Artist:
Man’s acceptance of his dependence on nature is more honest, while freedom-ideology, beyond a certain point, presumes the negation of that dependence and is therefore, also in a deeper sense, dishonest. This fundamental dishonesty toward nature then comes out as consciousness of guilt, which we see active in every process of art… the more strongly man feels his freedom and independence, the more intense on the other hand is the consciousness of guilt, which appears in the individual partly restrictive, partly creative. (pp. 328-329; italics added)
Guilt, therefore, is not merely a feeling of committing wrong against another, a residue of ”intrapsychic” sexual wishes, or a fear of punishment by a higher authority—such as parents or God. Like angst, guilt is existential, a given. As the ancient Greek dramatists knew so well, guilt is double-sided and can never be completely eliminated. In the deepest sense, guilt is what defines us as human beings as long as we live, grow, and create, or, conversely, as long as we deny and betray ourselves by failing to live, refusing to change and develop our potential, unthinkingly remaining embedded in the Other—be it the safety net woven by parents, organizations, ideologies, gods, therapists, or lovers. For this reason, said Rank, guilt—the inescapable complement of willing—is an emotional force in the human being as powerful as the biological impulse of sexuality:
Indeed, it is even shown that in many human beings inhibitions manifesting themselves as anxiety and guilt are stronger than the drives, that these inhibitions themselves, so to say, operate ”as a driving force” although in a different way from the biological impulses. In a word, we see that the psychical has become a force at least equal to the biological and that all human conflicts are to be explained just from this fact. (Rank, in press)
Even more profoundly, each person must accept and honor this existential pain, a necessary and vital part of the fully functioning
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Robert Kramer 71
person. In their creative expression, anxiety and guilt are not to be condemned or analyzed away merely as an unconscious residue of early upbringing, social oppression, or religious training. ”In no case will one be able to do away with human guilt feeling,” said Rank (1936/1978b), whose understanding of anxiety and guilt is matched only by that of Kierkegaard and Kafka, ”but it makes a great difference whether the [person] has fear and guilt reactions without visible reason, or whether he experiences guilt feeling as a result of exercising his own will” (p. 181). If not too severe, guilt serves as a harmonizing factor between the ”will to separate” and the ”will to unite,” linking I to Thou, reattaching part to whole, while simultaneously allowing the retention of one’s difference:
I think the guilt feeling occupies a special position among the emotions, as a boundary phenomenon between the pronounced painful affects that separate and the more pleasurable feelings that unite. It is related to the painful separating affects of anxiety and hate. But in its relation to gratitude and devotion, which may extend to self-sacrifice, it belongs to the strongest uniting feelings we know. As the guilt-feeling occupies the boundary line between the painful and pleasurable, between the severing and uniting feelings, it is also the most important representative of the relation between inner and outer, I and Thou, the Self and the World. (Rank, in press)
According to Rank, the fully functioning person ”must learn to live, to live with his split, his conflict, his ambivalence, which no therapy can take away, for if it could, it would take with it the actual spring of life” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 206). Vital to the process of differentiating self from other, the painful ”separating” affects of anger and hate must be accepted along with the pleasurable ”uniting” feelings of communion and love. Neither can be denied if one is to be a whole person. Neurosis, in this sense, is a partialization of the human being, an absence of wholeness, an unwillingness to accept the permanence of this ambivalent condition of life, a refusal of the burden of selfhood, a refusal of necessary suffering—”a refusal of life itself (p. 108).
”REAL THERAPY HAS TO BE CENTERED AROUND THE CLIENT
Each therapeutic hour, according to Rank, is a partial ”living and dying,” a microcosmic experience of separation and union. If the individual can accept himself or herself in this fragment of
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72 Rogers, Rank, and *The Beyond”
time, without too much anxiety or guilt, then living more fully outside the allotted hour may also be possible. Only through atonement, or, more precisely, at-orce-ment or being-at-one, can existential guilt be eased. The problem of human suffering, said Rank (1936/1978b), cannot be solved ain and by the individual himself, but only in relation to a second person, who justifies our will, makes it good, since he voluntarily submits himself to it” (p. 56)—in other words, accepts us as we are, a double helix of will and guilt, evil and good, destruction and creation. Freud’s technique does not do this, Rank maintained, because it interprets all expressions of will in the therapeutic hour as ”resistance” to the authority of the therapist, who stands in the center of the analysis in spite of his so-called passivity or neutrality. ”Classical psychoanalysis”—a term coined 80 years ago by Rank’s close friend, Sdndor Ferenczi, to describe the cold indifference of some overly intellectualized analysts toward the suffering of their patients— does not permit a genuine relationship between patient and analyst. It therefore tends to be interminable, promoting an endless minuet of projection and identification between a ”will-less,” virtually impotent patient and an all-powerful, all-forgiving, allknowing analyst, who never lets go of his or her authority.
Beginning with Freud, classical analysts have insisted that the patient’s resistance is almost entirely intrapsychic—that is, resistance to the emergence into consciousness of repressed sexual thoughts, impulses, defenses, memories, and feelings. Although Rank never denied the dynamics of inner conflict, which he saw as the creative tension between will and guilt, he observed that analysts tended to label as resistance anything that opposed their theory or, what amounts to the same thing, anything that ”interfered” with uncovering the Oedipal core of neurosis.
Far from trying to overcome resistance, Rank (1936/1978b) ”prize[d]w as an ”act of will” all of the human being’s creative energies, however misdirected into neurotic production (p. 192). Rather than eradicating pain, therapy helps clients make deeper contact with themselves and their ambivalences, anxieties, and guilt feelings. Therapy allows clients to own unacknowledged parts of their suffering, letting the pain sit in their laps, rather than displacing or projecting it onto others. Therapy helps clients listen more respectfully to themselves, evaluate more thoughtfully the meaning of their own presence on earth, their difference, ”I try to bring to fruition the autotherapeutic forces in the neurotic, which
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Robert Kramer 73
hide behind the so-called resistances, and often can manifest themselves only negatively” (p. 156). All emotions—positive and negative, loving and hateful, constructive and destructive—are expressions of the human being that must be confronted, worked through, accepted, and integrated to make a whole person.
The ”whole psychoanalytic approach is centered around the therapist,” Rank said in a 1935 lecture in New York, shortly before meeting Carl Rogers. ”Real therapy has to be centered around the client, his difficulties, his needs, his activities* (Rank, in press). Here we see clearly the origins of what Rogers would soon develop into client-centered therapy.
”My technique,” added Rank (1936/1978b) in Will Therapy, ”puts the patient himself as chief actor in the center of the situation set up by the analyst” (p. 6). Hinting at Freud’s own self-cent eredness, which is evident in all his case histories but to which Freud was almost completely blind, Rank dryly remarked: ”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” (p. 6).
The therapist is not to play the role of authority, according to Rank (1936/1978b), but is an ”assistant F (p. 68) who provides a helping relationship in which the neurotic—an ”artiste manque” (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 25), a kind of ”failed artiste—could affirm and rediscover his or her own positive will, become his or her own therapist, accept responsibility for his or her own individuality and difference, and say yes to the often painful obligation of living, as well as to the dreaded obligation of dying. Therapy opens a ”space” deep inside the person to contain or hold one’s self, one’s own creativity and its life-long complements, pain, guilt and anxiety. Compulsion can only be overcome creatively, said Rank (1932/1989) in Art and Artist, through the ”volitional affirmation of the obligatory” (p. 64)—that is, by deliberately saying yes to the ”Must,” accepting the need to individuate as well as the need to merge, experiencing both isolation and union, without becoming chained to one pole at the exclusion of the other.
Against psychoanalysis, which asserted that only interpretations cure and that the analyst must maintain strict neutrality, Rank had constructed ”a Philosophy of Helping” (Rank, 1936/
1978b, p. 2): The relationship between client and therapist was itself therapeutic, not the therapist’s insight into—or ”causal”
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74 Rogers, Rank, and ”The Beyond”
interpretation of-^the client’s infantile past or presenting problem. It is not what the client learns from the therapist’s interpretations that is healing. It is, rather, what Martin Buber (Friedman, 1985) called the ”I-Thou” relationship. ”All real living is meeting,” said Buber, and ”by the graciousness of its comings and the solemn sadness of its goings, [the I-Thou relationship] teaches us to meet others and to hold our ground when we meet them” (p. 68).
EMPATHIC UNDERSTANDING:
”THE SIMULTANEOUS DISSOLUTION
OF INDIVIDUALITY IN A GREATER WHOLE”
According to Rank (1936/1978b), experience—in other words, living itself—is nothing but ”emotional surrender to the present” (p. 27), to the Now. ”Such new experiencing, and not merely repetition of the infantile, represents the therapeutic process . . . thus making possible a connection to the reality of the moment” (pp. 39-40). The problem of experience, said Rank, is not how to understand or speak about the past, which has already been interpreted and reinterpreted a thousandfold in memory, but how to live in the present: Consciousness, thinking, feeling and willing are always in the present. ”This, then, is the New, which the patient has never experienced before” (p. 65).
Healing, or making whole, comes from mutual recognition not intellectual understanding. ”The making-good must be individual, personal, from the analyst as a person to the patient as a person” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 59). It is an emotional experience in the ”here and now” (p. 39) relationship with an empathic therapist that is more important for healing than interpretations that claim to uncover the repressed ”truth” about infancy, make the unconscious conscious, or provide insight into ”intrapsychic” conflicts. ”Not only less theory, but less ’art of interpretation* is necessary” (p. 5).
There is an alternative to interpretation therapy. ”In love and through love,” said Rank (1936/1978b), ”the individual can accept himself, his own will, because the other does, an other does” (p. 64). The love of the other places a value on one’s I, which can then be prized by the self. As a virtual synonym for love, Rank (1932/1989) used the German word Einfilhlung (p. 22), which means ”feeling into” or ”empathy,” defining it as an emotional attunement that allows one to merge into another in order to zieemerge as a new
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Robert Kramer 75
person, enriched in the process (Menaker, 1984). ”Rank is like a tender watching mother,” a client once said. ”The thing I am to accept is love. All I haven’t had, all I’ve wanted, flows through Rank, the medium to me. I accept. . . . Tb accept love, one must accept risk of pain” (Lieberman, 1985, p. 270).
On a microcosnric level, therapy is a process of learning how to give and take, surrender and assert, merge and individuate, unite and separate—without being trapped in a whipsaw of opposites. Only through relationship can the ”part-whole” problem be temporarily solved. ”The two selves become one, and the patient can now find in this enlarged self the differentiation necessary for life” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 176). Therapist and client, like everyone else, seek to find a constructive balance between separation and union. In psychological health, the contact boundary that links I and Thou ”harmoniously [fuses] the edges of each without confusing them” (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 104). Joining together in feeling, therapist and client do not lose themselves but, rather, rediscover and re-create themselves. In the simultaneous dissolution of their difference in a greater whole, therapist and client surrender their painful isolation for a moment, only to have individuality returned to them in the next, reenergized and enriched by the experience of ”loss .w In a sense, Einfilhlung might be better termed Zwiefuhlung: two selves, for a moment, feeling as one.
Empathic understanding, Rank told his Philadelphia students,
unites our ego with the other, with the Thou, with men, with the world, and so does away with fear. What is unique in love is that—beyond the fact of uniting—it rebounds on the ego. Not only, I love the other as my ego, as part of my ego, but the other also makes my ego worthy of love. The love of the Thou thus places a value on one’s own ego. Love abolishes egoism, it merges the self in the other to find it again enriched in one’s own ego. This unique projection and introjection of feeling rests on the fact that one can really only love the one who accepts our own self as it is, indeed will not have it otherwise than it is, and whose self we accept as it is. (Rank, in press)
One hallmark of neurosis, especially the narcissistic kind, is too extreme egoism or too much partialization: the incapacity to experience empathic understanding, connection, or Einfilhlung, So obsessed are narcissists by the fear of losing themselves, and their hard-won individuality, that they never seem to let ”emotion become whole or come up wholly, so that it can only express itself partially, i.e., negatively as guilt feeling” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 140). Here, guilt arises not from a denial of individuality but from its
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76 Rogers, Rank, and *The Beyond”
overemphasis. Unable to resolve even for a moment the ”partwhole” problem, the narcissist remains agonizingly alone, isolated psychologically from others while physically in their midst. This compulsive, overconcentration on self prevents the giving up of self Narcissism, according to Rank, is ”cement, as it were, that holds the parts of the ego together so firmly that they cannot be given out separately” (p. 141). Only through surrender to the wholeness of experience, ”with simultaneous emotional differentiation of the F (p. 183), can the suffering person begin to be healed. Only by reconnecting part to whole, I to Thou, can the compulsiveness of obsession—which derives from the Latin, sedere: to sit—be integrated into one’s own self, be tolerated to ”sit” more peacefully, as it were, less destructively, more creatively, on one’s own lap.
On a macrocosmic level, taking the experience of empathy as far as humanly possible, to the boundary of the spiritual, Rank cornpared the artist’s ”giving” and the enjoyer’s ”finding” of art with the dissolution and rediscovery of the self in mutual love. ”The art-work,” said Rank (1932/1989), ”presents an unity, alike in its effect and in its creation, and this implies a spiritual unity between the artist and the recipient” (p. 113). It is in art, and its correlative, love, that microcosm meets macrocosm, the human meets the spiritual.
At the height of the individuating impulse, the ”will to separate,” artists feel most strongly the longing for attachment, the ”will to unite” (see Montuori & Purser, 1995). Although artists begin the creative process by separating from their fellow human beings and liberating themselves from conforming to the past, escaping from ”the anxiety of influence” (Bloom, 1973), eventually the creative impulse merges into a desire for a return to ”a greater whole,” to ”the ALL” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 155)—in human terms, to the ”collective” that alone has the power to immortalize the artist with the approval it grants the artwork:
For this very essence of man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual… and not on a psychological identification with the artist that [aesthetic pleasure] ultimately depends.. . . But both of them, in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as a high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive
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it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling. (Rank, 1932/1989, pp. 109-110, italics added)
”I BECAME INFECTED WITH RANKIAN IDEAS”
Exactly what went on during Rogers’s presence at the three-day seminar in Rochester with Otto Rank in June 1936? Unfortunately, no record of this seminar exists. Rank mentioned it only twice, in correspondence with a friend, Jessie Taft, without naming Rogers. ”Yesterday,” wrote Rank on June 10,1936, ”I gave a general lecture somewhat like for the students in Philadelphia” (Taft, 1958, p.215). He added: ”I announced the books [i.e., Will Therapy and Truth and Reality] and am sure that most of them will get them” (p. 216). Afew days later, in another letter, he told Taft: ”Rochester was interesting and successful, but I am tired” (p. 216).
And what about Rogers? What could have been its impact on him? In an interview decades later, although not referring to the seminar itself, Rogers spoke in almost revelatory terms to his biographer of the experience of encountering Rank’s post-Freudian thinking:
I became infected with Rankian ideas and began to realize the possibilities of the individual being self-directing…. I was clearly fascinated by Rankian ideas but didn’t quite adopt his emphases for myself until I left Rochester But the core idea did develop. I came to believe in the individual’s capacity. I value the dignity and rights of the individual sufficiently that I do not want to impose my way upon him. These two aspects of the core idea haven’t changed since that time. (Kirschenbaum, 1979, p. 95)
Asked in the mid-1970s ”Were you influenced by Rank?” Rogers answered: ”Yes, I was … [by his] ideas of the relationship and focusing more on the immediate present . . . There’s no doubt that my ’therapy’ was influenced by his thinking” (Evans, 1975, pp. 28-29). In the same breath, however, without elaborating, Rogers noted that he was not attracted to Rank’s ”theory” (p. 29). Perhaps he found Rank’s writings, poorly translated from the German, too convoluted.
It is impossible now, over half a century later, to reconstruct what Rank said or did during this remarkable seminar in 1936. During much of the time, Rank may have spoken spontaneously. His technique, Rank (1936/1978b) once said, ”in every case, yes in every individual hour of the same case, is different. .. . My tech-
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78 Rogers, Rank, and ”The Beyond”
nique consists essentially in having no technique” (p. 105, italics added). The first practitioner of therapy as a performing art, Rank improvised a new theory for each client while honoring the client’s unique expression of the creative tension between life fear and death fear, separation and union, will and guilt. ”In each separate case,” he said, ”it is necessary to create, as it were, a theory and technique made for the occasion, without trying to carry over this individualized solution to the next case” (p. 3). Rank divorced therapy from theory, sharply criticizing psychoanalysis for asserting that the two were inseparable (Karpf, 1953, p. 50). For Rank, like Rogers, ”theory comes after experience” (Gendlin, 1988, p. 127).
How much of Rank, often a tangled writer, did Rogers actually read? Nobody knows. ”One searches Rogers’s writings in vain for even a single quotation from Rank,” according to Rogers’s biographer, ”or even for more than three consecutive sentences on Rank’s thinking” (Kirschenbaum, 1979, p. 92). Yet Rogers evidently was so moved by the seminar with Rank in 1936, and later by the lucid writings of Jessie Taft and Frederick Allen, two leading American students of Rank, that his view of the helping profession changed radically (Raskin, 1948). It is not possible to ”document exactly when Rogers began to use the term empathy or empathic understanding,” concludes a historian who traced the evolution of this term in psychology (Gladstein, 1984, p. 53). But in an essay entitled ”Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being,” Rogers recalls a Rankian social worker on his Rochester staff who ”helped me to learn that the most effective approach was to listen for the feelings, the emotions…. I believe she was the one who suggested that the best response was to ’reflect’ these feelings back to the client” (Rogers, 1980, p. 138). Once asked in a videotaped interview about who had been his teachers, Rogers answered: ”Otto Rank and my clients” (Rogers, 1983).
What might Rank have ”taught” Rogers? Invited to deliver a lecture in 1938 at the University of Minnesota before Psi Chi, the psychology honor society, Rank summarized his post-Freudian learnings with unusual clarity:
From my own experience, I learned that the therapeutic process is basically anemotional experience—which takes place independently of the theoretical concepts of the analyst, a statement that is borne out by the fact that therapeutic results have been attained and achieved by various methods of psychotherapy, based on different
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Robert Kramer 79
theories. Furthermore, the emphasis on the emotional experience— instead of on the intellectual enlightenment of the patient—brings two essential principles of my dynamic therapy into focus. Firstly, the emphasis is shifted from the past to the present, in which all emotional experience takes place; secondly, the therapeutic process allows the patient a much more active role than being merely an object upon whom the therapist operates….
All living psychology is relationship psychology. .. . What we learned from the analysis and understanding of this therapeutic relationship seems to have a bearing on other forms and types of relationships—such as exist between parent and child, teacher and pupil, husband and wife, in friendship, and so forth. That is to say, in all those relationships there seems to be a therapeutic element, if we conceive of that term in the broadest sense of the word. Simply speaking, this is the definition of relationship: one individual is helping the other to develop and grow, without infringing too much on the other’s personality. (Rank, in press)
CARL ROGERS AND THE ”BIRTH” OF CLIENT-CENTERED THERAPY
”It would seem quite absurd to suppose that one could name a day on which client-centered therapy was born,” said Rogers. ”Yet I feel it is possible to name that day and it was December 11,1940” (Kirschenbaum, 1979, p. 112). On that day at the University of Minnesota, before Psi Chi, at exactly the same place where Rank had spoken in 1938, Rogers presented his revolutionary paper <fNewer Concepts in Psychotherapy.”
Publicly crediting the thinking of Otto Rank, Rogers told his Minnesota audience that ”the aim of this newer therapy is not to solve one particular problem, but to assist the individual to grow7* (Kirschenbaum, 1979, p. 113). Unlike traditional approaches, this approach does not do anything to the individual; instead of ”treating” the person as an illness might be treated by a medical doctor, the newer therapy releases the creative potential from within. ”In the second place, this newer therapy places greater stress upon the emotional elements, the feeling aspects of the situation, than upon the intellectual aspects…. In the third place, this newer therapy places greater stress upon the immediate situation than upon the individual’s past. . . . Finally this approach lays stress upon the therapeutic relationship itself as a growth experience” (p. 113; italics added).
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80 Rogers, Rank, and ”The Beyond”
Somehow the ideas of Otto Rank had germinated in the mind of Carl Rogers, whether directly as a result of the 1936 seminar or indirectly through Rank’s students. Within a short time, Rogers began composing Counseling and Psychotherapy: Newer Concepts in Practice, which he published in 1942. ”It was in this book,” observes Brian Thorne (1992), the latest biographer of Rogers, ”that the term ’client* first appeared” (p. 13), a term that Rank had been using as early as the mid-30s. And it was in Client-Centered Therapy (1951) that Rogers for the first time referred in print to the therapist’s need for ”empathic understanding* of clients (Gladstein, 1984, p. 54).
Echoing Rank’s old-world philosophy of life in Art and Artist— ”the volitional affirmation of the obligatory* (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 64)—Rogers came to define the fully functioning person as one who deliberately and creatively says ”Yes” to the ”Must.” By doing so, the person affirms the loan of life, a loan that is fated to be repaid in full at the end—”returned,” so to speak, to the Cosmos, to ”the ALL” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 155). Such a person, concluded Rogers, in words that are almost identical to Rank’s, ”voluntarily chooses and wills that which is also absolutely determined” (Rirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989b, p. 418).
”I DO NOT LIKE TO BE THE MOTHER IN THE TRANSFERENCE”
Why were Rank’s ideas about relationship and empathy so threatening to the psychoanalytic establishment in the mid-1920s and, by extension, so novel to Rogers? lb shed light on this question, I want now to take us on a short detour into the history of die Sache, ”the cause,” as Freud always called his movement. ”I do everything only for the cause, which again, is basically my own,” Freud once confessed to Ferenczi. ”I proceed thoroughly egoistically” (Brabant, Falzeder, & Giampieri-Deutsch, 1993, p. 33). The discoveries of psychoanalysis, Freud told Ferenczi, were due to the ”tough work” of his self-analysis, which gave birth to the Oedipus complex.
After discovering the Oedipus complex, Freud always insisted on the preeminent significance of the child’s relation to its father. Treating Mother only as an object of sexual desire, Freud gave no importance in his theory or therapy to the emotional quality of the mother-child relationship (Sward, 1980). In none of his case histo-
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ries, for example, did he emphasize Mother’s loving or protective function. Nor, curiously, did he see the ”bad” or powerful mother until very late in his life, after the death of his own mother, Amalie, in 1930, whose funeral he declined to attend (Kramer, 1995a). In his technical papers, Freud rarely conceived of the analyst’s encounter with the patient as a nurturing experience, or even as a genuine person-to-person relationship. ”I do not like to be the mother in the transference,” he once told a patient, ”it always surprises and shocks me a little. I feel so very masculine” (Sayers, 1991, p. 8). For Freud, Father symbolized reason and objectivity— which were the ultimate goals of therapy.
The analyst was to be emotionally neutral, aloof, and nonresponsive, a ”blank screen” onto whom the patient transferred his or her intrapsychic emotional conflicts, wishes, and defenses. Trained in
19th-century science, which sharply separated subject from object, Freud was a physician who saw neurosis as an illness that needed to be treated like any other physical illness. The ”treatment” consisted of carefully dosed and timed interpretations by the analyst that would, after extensive emotional ”working through” by the patient, yield insights into the unconscious ”cause” of the patient’s infantile Oedipal conflicts. It was the development of intellectual insight that cured the illness, based on the principle that knowledge about the cause of the neurosis had healing power. Psychoanalysis, affirmed Freud, is a form of Nacherziehung: ”after-education” (S. Freud, 1916/1958f, p. 312).
Technique requires Indifferenz, Freud said repeatedly (1901/1960, p. 72; 1905/1958b, p. 145; 191471958c, p. 164)—the analyst’s ”indifference” to the suffering of the patient. ”We must see to it,” said Freud, ”cruel as it may sound, that the sufferings of the patient… do not come to an end prematurely” (Gay, 1988, p. 304). The word Indifferenz, although translated as ”neutrality” in the three places in which it appears in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, has a more callous connotation than ”neutrality.” According to Ernst Falzeder, coeditor of the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence, ”if Freud had meant ’neutrality* in the benevolent or non-intrusive sense, he would have used the perfectly adequate German word Neutralitat” (Falzeder, personal communication, November 19,1994).
It was interpretation, and only interpretation, that the analyst provided the patient. Empathy on the part of the analyst was at best a tool of observation, certainly not an agent of healing. At
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worst, it retarded the process of cure, which required the patient to learn how to separate his ”experiencing” or emotional self from his ”observing” or rational self (Sterba, 1934). Wo es war, soil ich werden, said Freud: ”Where it was, I shall be.” Where unconscious was, there conscious shall be. Where the seething cauldron of sexual passion was, there control shall be. Where the oceanic feeling of emotion was, there the dry and impassive claims of reason shall be. ”Where id was, there ego shall be,” said Freud. ”It is a work of culture—not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee,” an inlet of the North Sea in the Netherlands (S. Freud, 1933/1964, p. 80). According to Rank, ”Freud, by comparing his achievement to the drainage of the Zuider Zee as a piece of progressive engineering, prided himself on… having brought it, so to speak, under the individual’s control” (Rank, 1941/1958, p. 39).
Ideologically committed to positivism, Freud saw himself as an objective observer—a natural scientist—not a participant-observer in an interpersonal field. Virtually all the perceptions of the patient, he said, were distorted by the strange phenomenon of transference: expectations, wishes, and feelings of the patient that were entirely self-generated, based on ancient templates forged, once and for all, in the infantile past. The emotional neutrality and anonymity of the analyst were necessary so as not to contaminate the transference. Although recommending that the analyst listen closely to the patient—with ”evenly suspended attention” (S. Freud, 1912/1958e, p. Ill)—Freud’s attention always seemed to end up suspended precisely on the Oedipus complex, on the ”father imago” (S. Freud, 1912/1958a, p. 100) as he called it.
Defined as ”resistance,” perceptions by the patient about the person of the analyst, or the nature of the elusive and fantasysoaked encounter between the two, needed to be corrected by interpretations of the father-analyst during the ”working-through” process. The analyst and patient were physically together but otherwise entirely engaged in an ”I-It” relationship.
Freud wrote:
I cannot advise my colleagues too strongly to model themselves during the psychoanalytic treatment on the surgeon, who puts aside all feelings, even his human sympathy, and concentrates his mental forces on the single aim of performing the operation as skillfully as possible [The patient’s] recovery, as we know, primarily depends on the interplay of forces in him. The justification for requiring this emotional coldness in the analyst is that it creates … for the doctor
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a desirable protection for his own emotional life and for the patient the largest amount of help we can give him today. (S. Freud, 1912/1958e, p. 115, italics added)
Unaccountably, Freud often violated his own prescriptions and, at times, even invited patients to dinner, gave them money when they were in financial distress, engaged in spirited exchanges, joked, and chatted amiably during the analytic hour (Roazen, 1994). Never one to take his own prescriptions too seriously, Freud did whatever he thought was necessary to help patients reach Oedipal enlightenment. Yet to many analysts, the prescription of Indifferenz, or ”neutrality,” became dogma. For decades, the actual relationship to the patient in the here and now was almost irrelevant. This is no exaggeration. As late as the mid-1950s, for example, Anna Freud cautiously offered what she called ”technically subversive thoughts” about the real relationship:
With due respect for the necessary strictest handling and interpretation of the transference, I still feel that somewhere we should leave room for the realization that analyst and patient are also two people, of equal adult status, in a real relationship to each other. I wonder whether our—at times complete—neglect of this side of the matter is not responsible for some of the hostile reactions which we get from our patients, and which we are apt to ascribe to true transference only. But these are technically subversive thoughts and ought to be handled with care. (A. Freud, 1954/1968, p. 373, italics added)
It is only within the last 15 years or so, under the influence of Heinz Kohut’s self-psychology—which strikingly resembles person-centered therapy (Tbbin, 1991)—and of certain object-relations theorists, that analysts have been willing to consider an empathic relationship in the here and now as healing (Meissner, 1991, pp. 182-183). Some analysts, more Freudian than Freud, still refuse to do so: ”I am convinced,” says Charles Brenner, the classical analyst par excellence, ”that the concepts of therapeutic and working alliance… are neither valid nor useful” (Slipp, 1982, p. 329). For ”strict” Freudians, almost everything that emerges in the analytic setting takes place solely in the mind of the patient, as transference from the past. Therefore, a genuine encounter between analyst and patient is virtually impossible. Mutuality is unpsychoanalytic. ”My view,” says Axel Hoffer (1994), a strict Freudian, ”is that a relationship which enhances free associations and the deepest elucidation of conflict cannot be a mutual or reciprocal one” (p. 201). If the problem is intrapsychic, then so is
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the cure. Clearly, this is a ”one-body” not ”two-body” psychology (Haynal & Falzeder, 1993a, 1993b).
RANKS ALTERNATIVE:
”RELATIONSHIP THERAPY”
With his new approach to psychotherapy, Rank was contesting the notion that ”transference is all,” and its correlative—still current even in self-psychology and object-relations theory-^that the patient is an adult ”stuck with an incorporated infant, like a fishbone in the craw of his maturity” (Levenson in Mitchell, 1988, p. 170). In Will Therapy, Rank (1936/1978b) fully recognized transference and the regressive pull of the past but said that new experiencing—living in the present—and not merely repetition of the infantile is the value of therapy. ”The neurotic lives too much in the past anyway, that is,… he actually does not live” (p. 27).
In The Trauma of Birth (1924/1994), by suggesting that the prototype of the analytic situation was the preverbal mother-child dyad, Rank was shifting the psychoanalytic ”moment” of therapeutic action from intellectual understanding to empathic relationship. He had made a radical discovery, a discovery that dawned on him only gradually. Along with Ferenczi, he was moving from interpretation therapy to relationship therapy (Ferenczi & Rank,
1924/1956). As soon as it became clear to Rank that the quality of the patient’s emotional experience with the analyst was more important than ”insight” into the Oedipus complex—or even the pre-Oedipal complex—he realized that the therapist did not cure by ”reeducating” the patient with ”interpretations,” as Freud had maintained.
Instead, the therapist himself or herself was the cure: ”The only means of healing which psychotherapy has learned to use is itself a human being, the therapist, whose own psychology also must have a decided influence upon the treatment and its outcome” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 1). The problem with Freudian interpretation of the past, said Rank, is that it allows both therapist and patient to escape the emotionally charged present: the experience of two creative wills encountering, resisting, trusting, hating, loving, healing, and transforming each other. The analytic relationship is always cocreated.
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Neither aloof nor reluctant to confront patients when he felt it was helpful to promote their growth, Rank did not refrain from making challenging interpretations in his sessions. But he understood that all interpretation is subjective and tentative. Even interpretation of the present is scarcely valid or reliable while it is being enacted. ”It is not a question of whose interpretation is correct,” said Rank in a 1930 lecture, ”because there is no such thing as the interpretation or only one psychological truth.”
Psychology does not deal primarily with facts as science does but only with the individual’s attitude toward facts. In other words, the objects of psychology are interpretations—and there are as many of them as there are individuals and, even more than that, also the individual’s different situations, which have to be interpreted differently in every single manifestation. (Rank, in press)
By creating a metaphorical womb in the analytic situation, the therapist was to assist the patient in being reborn spiritually as an autonomous self, a new individual, separate and different from all other human beings, without suffering too greatly for separating from the therapist during the end phase of therapy. Thus ”my theory of the birth trauma,” concluded Rank (1936/1978b) in Will Therapy, is ”a universal symbol of the Ts discovery of itself and of its separation from the momentary assistant I, originally the mother, now the therapist” (p. 108).
And after spiritual rebirth, the continuing development of the psychologically healthy person proceeds, in a back-and-forth pattern,
in terms of relationship and separation by a succession of emotional attachments and dependencies on the one hand and independenceseeking separations and detachments on the other hand, with the creation of personality and the emergence of individuality as constantly evolving and expanding goals. From the primal attachment and separation at birth to the final detachment and separation at death, this process of binding and freeing continues, throughout the entire course of human life. (Karpf, 1953, pp. 74-75)
One of the greatest learnings of Rank, therefore, is that the individual and society are not antagonistic, as Freud insisted, but complementary. There is an eternal oscillation between the need for individuation and the need for attachment, the will to separate and the will to unite, independence and dependence, hate and love, aloneness and intimacy—between the invigorating, creative soli-
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86 Rogers, Rank, and ”The Beyond”
tude of freedom and the love and acceptance obtainable only within community. Both are essential, at once. This requires an exquisite balancing act, and presupposes that human beings accept the compatibility of what are seen as irreconcilable or contradictory needs. The false dichotomy between separation and union must be transcended. Tension is not the same as opposition. What is necessary, suggests Ernest Becker (Liechty, 1995), is accepting ”maximum individuality within maximum community” (p. 144). Managing the dialectic between autonomy and connection—what Rank (1936/1978b) called ”the part-whole problem” (p. 134)—is the principal task of the human being in the process of becoming a fully functioning person, in the process of ”the never completed birth of individuality” (Rank, 1936/1978a, p. 11, italics added). One must solve and constantly re-solve the part-whole problem throughout life, not just in therapy (OTtowd, 1986).
Psychological health means living the impossible—fearlessly and creatively ”seeking at once isolation and union” (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 86, italics added). Isolation alone is not enough, but neither is total immersion in the other at the expense of affirming one’s difference. Individual and social life are in peril, according to Rank, if we cannot somehow find creative solutions to integrate part and whole—that is, to optimize jointly our two lifelong needs for differentiation and relatedness, assertion and surrender, authority and humility, will and love.
”MIDWIFE”
Soon after his exhilarating 1936 meeting with Otto Rank, Carl Rogers began to formulate the three ”core conditions” that he felt were necessary for healing, or a ”making whole” of the human being. The word whole derives from the Old English hal, which means ”healthy” or ”hale”—that is, not broken. Interestingly, the ”wholeness” that comes from ”healing” is also related to the words holy and holiness. Healing and wholeness, therefore, are spiritual phenomena. Deceptively simple to state, but remarkably difficult to practice, Rogers’s three core conditions offer clues as to how a person, of either sex, could become a midwife for the birth, spiritually, of another person. ”I rejoice,” wrote Rogers (1951) in the introduction to Client-Centered Therapy, ”at the privilege of being a midwife to a new personality—as I stand by with awe at the
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emergence of a self, a person, as I see a birth process in which I have had an important and facilitating part” (Rirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989b, p. 4; italics added). What were Rogers’s three core conditions for spiritual rebirth?
First, and most important, the helper must be congruent, fully present in the here and now, with no pretense of emotional distance, no professional facade. ”It is only as he is, in this relationship, a unified person, with his experienced feeling, his awareness of his feelings, and his expression of those feelings all congruent,” wrote Rogers, ”that he is most able to facilitate therapy” (Kirschenbaum, 1979, p. 196). Often misunderstood as simply a passive reflection of the client’s emotions, Rogers’s approach demanded a wholesome self-assertiveness of the helper’s own creative will, own individuality, own difference. A colleague remembered admiringly Rogers’s personal strength and ”will power” (p. 398), a powerful sense of will that shines through all of Rogers’s dialogues with Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, B. P. Skinner, Gregory Bateson, Michael Polanyi, and Rollo May (Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989a). Obviously, affirming one’s own will does not mean that helpers burden clients with their problems or blurt out all their feelings impulsively. For Rogers, however, fully accepting a client never meant denying the helper’s own individuality, being overly permissive, or becoming weak and ineffectual. No ”gentle Jesus,” Rogers was a ”very strong and controversial man” who consistently strove to behave in a respectful but ”confident, direct, and selfassertive manner” (Kirschenbaum, 1979, p. 186), according to the testimony of close associates. ”The therapist encounters his client directly,” wrote Rogers, ”meeting him person to person. He is being himself, not denying himself (Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989a, p. 12).
Second, the helper must communicate unconditional positive regard for the uniqueness—the sheer separateness and difference— of the other person. Rogers defined this as ”caring for the client as a separate person, with permission to have his own feelings, his own experience” (Kirschenbaum 1979, p. 199; italics added). The perceptions of the client are not ”distortions” of a ”reality” that only the helper has the vision to see clearly. Without excluding the possibility of unconscious factors affecting the perceptions of both parties, the helper accepts the client’s ”phenomenology” as reflecting the constantly fluctuating conditions of the moment, whether or not the client’s perceptions agree with the helper’s view. ”Each
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person is an island unto himself, in a very real sense, and he can only build bridges to other islands if he is first of all willing to be himself and permitted to be himself,** wrote Rogers. ”So I find that when I can accept another person . . . then I am assisting him to become a person” (Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989b, p. 22).
There are no objective psychological facts for Rogers, as for Rank, only subjective interpretations of phenomena. And the client, not the helper, is the ”expert” on the meaning of these phenomena as they apply to his or her experience. There is, in short, no single reality. All experience in the consulting room is cocreated. Accepting the client’s frame of reference, therefore, requires extraordinarily active listening. As a practical matter, Rogers frankly admitted that unconditional positive regard was ”a matter of degree in any relationship,” and that he himself sometimes experienced ”only a conditional positive regard—and perhaps at times a negative regard, though this is not likely in effective therapy* (Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989b, p. 225; italics added).
Third, the helper must express genuine empathic understanding for the client. Empathic understanding is a form of nonpossessive love that the ancient Greeks called Agape—to distinguish it from Eros, a grasping possessive love that insists on its own desires being met. In dialogue with Tillich, Rogers defined Agape as ”a listening to oneself, as well as a listening love for the other individual” (Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989a, p. 78). The ”way of being with another person” that is termed empathic has several facets, according to Rogers (1980):
It means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive, moment to moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever, that he or she is experiencing. It means temporarily living in the other’s life, moving about it delicately without making judgments; it means sensing meanings of which he or she is scarcely aware, but not trying to uncover totally unconscious feelings, since this would be too threatening, (p. 142)
Rogers also made it clear that empathy or love—giving oneself freely to another person—did not mean losing oneself permanently in the other. Maintaining the separateness of the helper was essential for permitting the separateness of the client. Only by being separate could empathy be offered. ”When I can freely feel this strength of being a separate person,” said Rogers, ”then I find
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I can let myself go much more deeply in understanding and accepting [the client] because I am not fearful of losing myself (Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989b, p. 121). The key to healing was the emotional experience of being in relationship, fully separate yet somehow simultaneously connected with another.
Paradoxically, as Rank had emphasized, it was an empathic relationship that allowed individuality to emerge, that spawned the self-acceptance necessary for discovering—or, better, recovering or uncovering—one’s creative potential. Only by willing to be oneself within relationship, by accepting one’s own difference and having it accepted by another, could a person discover the creativity and strength to change. The word change derives from the Latin cambire, which means ”to exchange,” or ”to give and take”—capturing the relational aspect missed by the word change alone.
Beyond these three core conditions, according to Rogers, technique was irrelevant. Of course no mortal can always be completely congruent, accepting, and empathic. Therefore, Rogers visualized the core conditions, which are met to a lesser or greater degree, as located on a continuum. And the art of the helper, Rogers believed, consists entirely in moving further and further along the continuum, getting better and better at being or performing these conditions—not just espousing them. Modest about his therapeutic prowess, Rogers, who was never convinced that he fully met his own conditions, thought it fortunate that ”imperfect human beings can be of therapeutic assistance to other imperfect human beings” (Rogers, 1959, p. 215).
In sum, then, what was Carl Rogers’s message to the helping professions? ”I can state the overall hypothesis in one sentence,” said Rogers (1961). ”If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur” (p. 33; italics added).
”THE DAIMONIC”
As the creator of relationship therapy, a break from Freud’s interpretation therapy, Otto Rank would wholeheartedly endorse Rogers’s hypothesis. If asked, however, he might plead with Rogers for a single but crucial addition: the centrality of confrontation in therapy and in life. The rumbling of the daimonic, according to
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90 Rogers, Rank, and ”The Beyond”
Rank, can always be heard when two subjectivities—two powerful and creative and destructive human beings—discover, test, love, hate, heal, and transform each other, inside or outside the consulting room. As Rollo May observed long ago, the daimonic is perhaps the single human phenomenon that Rogers was never able to integrate fully into his therapy or his life. May (1969) explained in Love and Will, a work whose veiy title shows the depth of Rank’s influence on May, that
the daimonic is the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and increase itself… aggression, hostility, cruelty [are] the reverse side of the same assertion which empowers our creativity. All life is a flux between these two aspects of the daimonic. We can repress the daimonic, but we cannot avoid the toll of apathy and the tendency toward later explosion which such repression brings in its wake. (p. 123)
”If the daimonic urge is integrated into the personality,” May told Rogers in a famous open letter, ”which is, to my mind, the purpose of psychotherapy, it results in creativity^ (Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989a, p. 240)—that is, the freeing of the constructive or positive will. May always distinguished the demonic, a term he preferred not to use, from the daimonic, which he insisted has a profoundly positive and healthy side. ”I find it important that the patient be able to take a stand against me,” he told Rogers. ”This means that aspects of evil—anger, hostility against the therapist, destructiveness—need to be brought out in therapy” (p. 246).
The daimonic is especially prominent during the end phase of therapy, according to Rank, when patient and therapist are locked, symbolically, in loving conflict, a ”battle,” said Rank (1936/1978b) in Will Therapy, with only slight exaggeration, ”of life and death”:
In the simplest formulation derived from my experience, the end phase . . . can be represented as a battle for life heightened to the utmost between two individuals, one of whom must die that the other may live. (pp. 178-179)
There can be no doubt that in this duel the patient must remain victor if he is to feel himself healed, that is, capable of living, and the danger of the therapist lies in the fact that he instinctively wants to be victorious, that is, to live and not be killed…. [The patient’s] restoration to health consists essentially in the freedom of the creative powers, which must be first released in the therapeutic process in an aggressive way before they can be applied to the constructive governing of life. (pp. 179-180; italics added)
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It is hard to imagine Rogers, who never felt entirely comfortable in accepting his client’s angry or hateful feelings toward him, encouraging the daimonic force that Rank and May insisted was a central component of change in therapy—the reverse side of creativity itself. One can only speculate as to why Rogers, a deeply cultured person who understood full well the insane horrors that humanity has inflicted on itself and the planet, minimized the daimonic or, as May noted in his open letter, confused it with the demonic. Certainly, Rogers saw both the love and hate that emerged, like a volcanic eruption, within the crucible of the therapeutic encounter Perhaps Rogers’s own strong need for acceptance and love from clients clouded his vision of the daimonic, leading him to downplay the fiery power of anger and hatred within himself and his clients.
”I find it difficult to be easily or quickly aware of angry feelings in myself,” Rogers admitted. ”I deplore this, and am slowly learning in this respect” (Rirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989b, p. 348). And, even more revealingly, in his autobiography, Rogers (1967) confessed that empathic understanding was what he himself’had always been seeking: ”I have since become keenly aware that the point of view I developed in therapy is the sort of help I myself would like” (p. 368).
One of the first to recognize the mutuality of the therapeutic encounter, Otto Rank knew that clients, from their side, may attempt to ”cure” the therapist’s suffering with their own love, their own empathic understanding. At one point or another, all clients act as therapists to their therapists. But taken to the extreme, a client’s ”love” or ”empathy” for his or her therapist may end up unintentionally forfeiting the client’s dearly bought, still fragile, sense of independence. like Rogers, Rank did not disdain the healing he himself obtained from the empathy offered by clients. But he never forgot that the final goal of establishing a therapeutic relationship is, paradoxically, the client’s separation and the rediscovery and affirmation of the client’s difference. There is a dark, or daimonic, side to empathy, just as there is to will. Tb continue forever loving or identifying with ”an all-pardoning” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 21) therapist may end up reinfantalizing clients, inhibiting their creativity, keeping them neurotically attached to the therapist by guilt. Clients may react ”as if [they] could not desert the therapist because the latter would suffer too much” (p. 84). If
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92 Rogers, Rank, and ”The Beyond*’
the therapist’s own need for healing or love ”leads to misunderstanding or, more correctly, misinterpreting the situation, then emerges the so-called ’counter-transference/ * said Rank (in press), presciently defining the phenomenon modern therapists calljorojective identification. ”This consists in the analyst going beyond the identification necessary for understanding the patient. The analyst, in his turn, now projects onto the patient, who identifies with this projected part of the analyst’s ego, leading to the form of love identification we call Infatuation*” (in press).
[However,] one cannot help [clients] by driving them back to the old identifications or by offering them new possibilities of identification. One has to help them to get beyond the deadlock in their personality and in the process find their own self, (in press)
For this to happen, during the end phase the client must be able to find the creative will to destroy, metaphorically, the therapistmidwife and the therapeutic relationship, and separate from both without suffering too much guilt and anxiety.
For Rank, as for Rollo May, fully accepting the power of a client’s creativity means accepting, without qualification, this destructive or daimonic side as well, which Rank called ”counter-will.” Essential to the differentiation of self from nonself, and to furthering individuation, the daimonic is ”proof, however negative, of the strength of will on which therapeutic success ultimately depends” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 6).
Despite the different value they placed on the daimonic, it is to Carl Rogers, and before him, Otto Rank, ”the precursor of clientcentered practice” (Thome, 1992, p. 58), that therapists owe the great idea of offering ”a certain type of relationship” (Rogers, 1961, p. 33) to clients as a way of helping them find a vital balance between the part and the whole, difference and likeness, the self and the world—in short, between I and Thou—an empathic relationship, or ”healing through meeting,” in Buber’s terms, that has the potential of allowing a person to merge into the whole in order to reemerge enriched and spiritually renewed in his or her singular individuality By their teachings, and even more by their practice, Otto Rank and Carl Rogers opened the way for countless other helping professionals to ”prize the new… even if it should contradict the ideology of the [helper]” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 105), to prize, through empathic understanding, the spiritual rebirth of their clients. It is only through the experience of relationship,
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insisted Rogers, that the human being ”accepts others as unique individuals different from himself, prizes himself, and prizes others” (Rychlak, 1980, p. 595).
But what, exactly, do we mean when we speak of the spiritual— as opposed to the merely human—core of the therapeutic relationship?
”IS THIS THE ONLY REALITY?”
Near the end of his life, Carl Rogers experienced something close to an epiphany. Deep empathic exploration of the inner, emotional meanings of the lives of his clients had brought him, without his full awareness, to the border of, what he now called, ”the transcendent, the indescribable, the spiritual” (Thorne, 1992, p. 22). All along, it seems, Rogers had been ”negotiating”—in his uncompromisingly secular way—”with the problem of the Beyond.”
Like Otto Rank, whose last book was entitledBeyorcd Psychology (1941/1958), Rogers concluded, after practicing psychotherapy for half a century, that there is a realm beyond the capacity of ”normal” science or psychology to understand. Until the last two decades of his life, however, Rogers was reluctant to make his ”concluding unscientific postscript” explicit, for fear, perhaps, of having his spiritual longings confused with the dogmatism of Christianity that he had rejected in his youth (Thorne, 1992). But in the 1970s, partly in response to coping with the long illness of his wife, Helen, Rogers posed his greatest challenge to scientific psychology: ”Is this the only reality?” (Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989b, p. 370). Or, more poignantly: ”Do we really need ’a’reality?” (p. 400).
I would like to make this a bit more personal. I have never had a mystical experience, nor any type of experience of a paranormal reality, nor any drug-induced state that gave me a glimpse of a world different from our secure ”real” world. Yet, the evidence grows more and more impressive (p. 371)
Perhaps in the coming generations of younger psychologists . . . there will be a few who will dare to investigate the possibility that there is a lawful reality which is not open to our five senses; a reality in which present, past, and future are intermingled, in which space is not a barrier, and time has disappeared; a reality which can be perceived and known only when we are passively receptive, rather than actively bent on knowing. This is one of the most exciting challenges posed to psychology, (p. 373, italics added)
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Shortly before he died, although remaining agnostic, Rogers came to recognize this strange ”reality,” and spoke of it glowingly, in terms such as ”the transcendent, the indescribable, the spiritual” (Thorne, 1992, p. 22). This was a realm that Rogers had rejected in the 1920s when he abandoned his religious studies at Union Theological Seminary for a career in scientific research (p. 22).
It was within the therapist-client relationship that Rogers was finding the most compelling data to support his hypothesis of a realm beyond psychology. ”Rogers discovered that a self-propelled process arises from inside,” says Eugene Gendlin (1988), one of Rogers’s closest students. ”When each thing is received utterly as intended, it makes new space inside. Then the steps go deeper and deeper” (p. 127). Ironically, the spiritual had always been there, hidden in what was closest and most familiar to Rogers: the empathic union between I and Thou.
”I am impelled to believe,” wrote Rogers one year before he died, ”that I, like many others, have underestimated the importance of this mystical, spiritual dimension” (Thorne, 1992, p. 22). Only near the end, it appears, did Rogers fully appreciate the deeper meaning of his life’s work as a therapist, the spiritual meaning of empathy itself. Although never devaluing science, he now acknowledged that there was a nonscientific, or mystical, dimension to practicing psychotherapy. ”I feel as though I am somehow in tune with the forces of the universe,” Rogers once told Paul Tillich, ”or that forces are operating through me in regard to this helping relationship” (Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989a, p. 74).
Could the thought of Otto Rank have influenced Carl Rogers’s increasing appreciation of spirituality and being ”in tune” with the cosmos? No one knows for certain, because Rogers never spoke of Rank in this connection, but if one pays close attention to the metaphors Rogers favored, a remarkable echo of Rank’s voice may be heard.
I want now to explore a question whose implications for therapy are truly astonishing. A question whose implications Rank understood in all his writings on creativity and relationship, beginning as early as 1924 in his much-maligned The Trauma of Birth, but perhaps most profoundly in his two masterworks, Art and Artist (1932/1989) and Will Therapy (1936/1978b). The question is this: In a macrocosmic sense, what does it mean for a human being to serve as ”midwife” for the emergence of ”a new personality” (Rogers in Kirschenbaum & Henderson, 1989b, p. 4)? What does
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it mean to be born, much less reborn? Ib come alive? Ib be conscious of living? Tb be fully present in the here and now? What does it mean ”to develop” a human being—to make visible that which is invisible, like a photograph developing out of its chemical solution? And what, exactly, is the catastrophic primal trauma—from the Greek, trauma: wound—that Rank called, without exaggeration, ”the trauma of birth”? In the process of exploring this question, I want, at the same time, to reflect on what Rogers might have meant when he crafted his therapeutic credo in these hauntingly Rankian terms: ”I stand by with awe at the emergence of a self, a person, as I see a birth process in which I have had an important and facilitating part”—the birth of a person—”struggling to be himself, yet deathly afraid of being himself” (pp. 3-4).
”A GREATER WHOLE”
Immersed in the richness of the arts and humanities, Otto Rank, even as a disciple of Freud, always believed that the ”scientific” approach of psychoanalysis was insufficient to explain the human being. Like Rogers, however, Rank was never a believer in the conventional sense (Lieberman, 1985, p. 406). Prom biblical times through the Crusades, to current events in the Middle East, the daimonic history of religion gives bloody proof that belief in ”God” inhibits as much as promotes expression of genuine spirituality. But Rank did not want to throw out the baby of spiritual experience with the bathwater of religious dogma. Without opposing science or advocating religion, either Western or Eastern, Rank (1932/
1989) wrote with passion of two experiences that allow mortals to ”negotiate,” if only fleetingly and metaphorically, ”with the problem of the Beyond” (p. 49). These were creativity and relationship: art and love. The nexus between the two, for Rank, was empathy: the key to Rogers’s spiritualization of therapy
In the jointly created—and endlessly re-created—”moment” of empathy between artist and enjoyer, lover and beloved, I and Thou, client and therapist, separateness is dissolved only to be rediscovered, enriched, and renewed by the dissolution of the individual into the void. ”Love abolishes egoism,” said Rank (in press), ”it merges the self in the other to find it again enriched in one’s own ego.” We can only love the one who truly accepts us as we are, and whose self we accept in like manner. But, as all the world’s wisdom
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literature teaches, to find oneself it may be necessary to lose oneself, if only for a moment. ”What is unique in love is that— beyond the fact of uniting—it rebounds on the ego,” said Rank (in press), ”Not only, I love the other as my ego, as part of my ego, but the other also makes my ego worthy of love. The love of the Thou thus places a value on one’s own ego.” Only through mutual recognition is healing, or becoming whole, possible.
That we can also ”masochistically” love someone who rejects us is evidence, Rank thought, for the irrepressible human urge to lose our separateness and merge with another—in Tillich’s theological terms, ”the Other*—even when such love is one-sided or chimerical, like Rollo May, Rank did not ignore the darker, or daimonic, side of love, what D. H. Lawrence (1920/1960) once called the ”yoke and leash of love” (p. 247). This is love as uncritical obedience; love as willing bondage; love as the green-eyed monster, jealousy; love as transference (Kramer, 1989, pp. 369-370).
But Rank distinguished one-sided transference love from the deep sharing of spirituality possible in genuine, mutual loving. Transference, he said, is a form of protective identification: ”an attempt of the individual to personify his will in the other and so to justify it instead of denying it [Transference] is the continuation of the unreal will justification in God through the earthly deification of a real person whose will must be as like ours as possible” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 60). The dependence and subjection of transference love, therefore, is an unhealthy solution to the part-whole problem, a too-extreme unburdening of responsibility and selfhood. Transference is an ”individual who makes a god for himself as he yields himself to the deified loved one” (p. 60).
Although impossible to eradicate, transference can be reduced during the end phase of therapy, when, at the appropriate time, the therapist ”prize[s]” the client’s ”will to separate” as an expression of creativity, ”the act of will as such, instead of condemning it” as resistance to analytic insight or acting-out (Rank, 193671978b, p. 192). This ”throws back projection and identification into the individual and places it on himself, on his own will and his own responsibility, without permitting the will justification in the projection or the rolling off of responsibility in the identification” (pp. 79-80).
Although traces of transference linger in all relationships, the real love obtainable in a mutual relationship, and the sublime, almost otherworldly, spiritual pleasure we experience in surren-
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dering willingly to the beautiful in art, allows us, said Rank (1932/1989) in Art and Artist, a more creative solution to the part-whole problem than transference: the ”dissolution of.. . individuality in a greater whole” (p. 110). But what, precisely, is this ”greater whole”?
”AN IDENTITY WITH THE COSMIC PROCESS”
In The Trauma of Birth (1924/1994), the book that led to his expulsion from Freud’s inner circle, Rank cited the mystic ”who cries out in beloved ecstasy: The I and the You have ceased to exist between us, I am not I, You are not You, also You are not I; I am at the same time I and You, You are at the same time You and F ” (p. 177). Following the wisdom of the Upanishads, Rank called this experience ”the unio mystica, the being at one with the All” (p. 176)—being ”in time” with the cosmos. And in Will Therapy (1936/1978b), he emphasized that even more than the pain of physiological birth, the psychological angst that a human being experiences in birth—and, by analogy, during the anxiety-provoking separation phase of therapy—is existential: ”Cosmic as it were, loss of connection with a greater whole, in the last analysis with the’all’”(p. 124).
The trauma of birth, Rank once told a friend, ”is really a great vision of the idea of separation governing the universe” (Lieberman, 1979, p. 18), not just the idea of separation from mother or from ”internal objects,” mental representations or imagos of significant others.
Only through mutuality, through empathic identification with another in a here-and-now relationship, can the pain of separation be eased. If we truly open our hearts, moreover, we may find that there is a macrocosmic level of empathy as well as a microcosmic— or merely human—form:
This identification is the echo of an original identity, not merely of child and mother, but of everything living—witness the reverence of the primitive for animals. In man, identification aims at re-establishing a lost identity: not an identity which was lost once and for all, phylogenetically through the differentiation of the sexes, or ontologically in birth, but an identity with the cosmic process, which has to be surrendered and continuously re-established in the course of self-development. (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 376; italics added)
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In the most profound sense, then, our experience of dissolution in art and love—that is, temporarily ”losing” or ”surrendering” our identity to ”find” it again later, enriched as a by-product of the experience of merger—brings us, asymptotically, to the border of the ineffable, a wordless region beyond ”the passing identification of two individuals” (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 113). This approach is asymptotic. We can never actually reach or cross the border of the ineffable, for how can human consciousness ever know that which is utterly different from itself: the numinous or the Other? Like all other solutions to the part-whole problem, this feeling must ”be surrendered and continuously re-established in the course of selfdevelopment” (p. 376).
In a macrocosmic sense, empathic understanding brings us to the border, one might say, of the ”unthought known” (Bollas, 1987), the border of a terra incognita—unthinkable and unsayable because it is shrouded in darkness. Yet, if we surrender with all our heart and soul to the experience of empathy, the outlines of the unthought, elusive and forever unreachable, may nevertheless somehow be dimly ”known.”
In one of his most poetic passages, Rank (1932/1989) suggests that this transcendent feeling of empathy implies not only a ”spiritual unity* between artist and enjoyer, I and Thou, but also ”with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved” (p. 113)—an identity with ”the ALL” that once was but is no more. The healing nature of the empathic relationship, Rank (1936/1978b) believed, affirms difference but, paradoxically, also ”leads to the release from difference, to the feeling of unity with the self, with the other, with the cosmos” (p.
58; italics added). In empathy, microcosm meets macrocosm. Of the uncanny feeling of spiritual unity we experience in surrendering ourselves—giving up temporarily the burden of our difference—to the Other in art or love, Rank (1932/1989) writes in Art and Artist:
[It] produces a satisfaction which suggests that it is more than a matter of the passing identification of two individuals, that it is the potential restoration of a union with the Cosmos, which once existed and was then lost. The individual psychological root of this sense of unity I discovered (at the time of writing The Trauma of Birth, 1924) in the prenatal condition, which the individual in his yearning for immortality strives to restore. Already, in that earliest stage of individualization, the child is not only factually one with the mother
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but beyond that, one with the world, with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapors in which present, past, and future are dissolved. The individual urge to restore this lost unity is (as I have formerly pointed out) an essential factor in the production of human cultural values, (p. 113)
Is it conceivable that a search for this ”lost unity”—this otherworldly identity with the Cosmos, an identity not ”merely” with the human mother that bore us but an identity that echoes, preverbally, with all that lives—is what Carl Rogers was hinting at when he wrote, in almost the same terms as Rank, of investigating the possibility of ”a reality in which present, past, and future are intermingled, in which space is not a barrier, and time has disappeared” (Kirschenbaum & Henderson 1989b, p. 373)?
Rollo May, a great admirer of Rank and close friend of Tillich, said that by ”surrendering” our ”difference” in the experience of love we are temporarily thrown into the void. In love, according to May, we approach the ultimate but veiled boundary of existence, the no-geography of the Unknown and Unknowable, the numinous:
When we love, we give up the center of ourselves. We are thrown from our previous existence into a void; and though we hope to obtain a new world, a new existence, we can never be sure. . . . Tb love completely carries with it the threat of annihilation of everything. This intensity of consciousness has something in common with the ecstasy of the mystic in his union with God: just as he can never be sure God is there, so love carries us to that intensity of consciousness in which we no longer have any guarantee of security. (May, 1969, p. 101)
When we experience empathic rather than scientific understanding, is it possible that the unthought we dimly ”know”—the lost unity with the Cosmos we hope, perhaps unconsciously, to restore—is so strange and fantastic that it is entirely beyond reason? When we fall into the void of love, are we somehow reminded of what Rogers came to call, with awe and humility, ”the transcendent, the indescribable, the spiritual” (Thorne, 1992, p. 22)? In the empathic ”moment” of love or art, do we come face-to-face, at least fleetingly, with the mysterium tremendum itself: the sheer absurdity and improbability of human existence? But what, exactly, is this ”tremendous mystery” that humbles, fascinates, and seduces us, all at the same time—a mystery at once ”horrible and holy” (Schneider, 1993), daimonic and Godlike?
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”AN INEXPLICABLE ’REMAINDER’”
In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921/1976), D. H. Lawrence says that the ultimate mystery is none other than the human being itself—a mystery beyond all scientific understanding. The human being is an inexplicable gap in causality, a ”difference” that materializes in the Cosmos, created out of nothing, in defiance of reason and science:
There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents. Something which could not be derived from the natures of all the existent individuals or previous individuals. There is in the nature of the infant something entirely new, underived, something which is, and which will for ever remain, causeless. And this something is the unanalyzable, undefinable reality of individuality. Every time at the moment of conception of every higher organism an individual nature incomprehensibly arises in the universe, out of nowhere. Granted the whole cause-andeffect process of generation and evolution, still the individual is not explained…. There is no assignable cause, and no logical reason, for individuality. On the contrary, individuality appears in defiance of scientific law, in defiance even of reason, (p. 214; italics added)
Because scientific understanding cannot account for the arrival on the planet of a single dandelion, much less a new human life, ”an inexplicable Remainder’had therefore to be admitted,” said Rank (1932/1989) in Art and Artist, ”but this remainder embraced no more and no less than the whole problem of artistic creativity” (p. 63, italics added). This, then, is the New, which has never before been experienced: a new being that has arisen incomprehensibly, from nowhere, out of cosmic dust, out of the void. ”We are not our own,” said Rank (1936/1978b), ”no matter whether we perceive the guilt religiously toward God, socially toward the father, or biologically toward the mother” (p. 101). ”Who,” Carl Rogers once asked, ”can bring into being this whole person” (Rirschenbaum & Henderson 1989b, p. 370)—a person for whom ”each moment would be new* (p. 413)?
The ”natural-scientific” solution to the mystery of birth, according to Rank, who thought highly of Lawrence’s psychological acumen (Taft, 1958, p. 175),
does not satisfy the child in the least, and if we want to be honest we have to admit also that it does not satisfy ourselves and it only seems to satisfy because we know we have no other reply. Perhaps
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this explains why the adult seems to suffer from the sexual problem as much as the child: because the biological solution of the problem of humanity is also ungratifying and inadequate for the adult as for the child. The religious solution was and still is so much the more gratifying because it admits the Unknown, indeed recognizes it as the chief factor instead of pretending an omniscience that we do not possess. (Rank, 1932, p. 44)
The ”truth” of biological or causal understanding, continued Rank, who was no more antisdentific than Rogers, is too easily confused with reality:
We might give the correct biological answer to the child’s concrete question as to the arrival of a little brother or sister, but we do not thereby touch the child’s fear of life that is behind this question, and which cannot be explained causally because it is rooted in the fear of the Unknown and Unknowable…. But this craving for the truth is rather a fanaticism for reality than a real love of truth and hence stops short before the admission of the truth concerning our lack of knowledge, (pp. 46-47, italics added)
”WHO AM I? HOW DID I COME INTO THE WORLD? WHY WAS I NOT CONSULTED?”
Like D. H. Lawrence and Otto Rank, Carl Rogers concluded that science, for all its magnificent contributions to improving the lot of humanity, curing diseases, and inventing the microprocessor, simply has nothing to say about the beginning of life or the end of life. No matter how much science unravels the secrets of biology, chemistry, or physics, it will never have one word to say about what it means to be conscious, to be alive, during this infinitesimal moment of light, a holiday on earth, between two eternities of darkness. What do we flesh-and-blood mortals know of these two impenetrable darknesses—the void after death and the void before conception—two oblivions that engulf the human being, and mirror each other so eerily? Nothing.
Pascal (1657/1961), the 17th-century scientist and mystic, wondered:
For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the infinite, an absolute in comparison with nothing, a central point between nothing and all.. . . He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he came, and the infinite in which he is engulfed, (p. 52)
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When I consider the short extent of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space that I fill or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces unknown to me and which know me not, I am terrified and astounded.. .. Who put me here? (p. 57)
According to Michel Foucault, consciousness discovers ”both in itself and outside itself, at its borders yet also in its very warp and woof, an element of darkness, an apparently inert density in which it is embedded, an unthought which it contains entirely, yet in which it is also caught” (Sass, 1992, pp. 329-330). Caught in the darkness of the unthought known, like a deer in a car’s headlights, is the consciousness of living—the beam of light shining on the here and now.
Therefore, for Otto Rank and Carl Rogers, the problem of living—being fully present and conscious on the planet—may be condensed into one, almost unanswerable, question: How does a person discover from within the creative will to say, ” *Yes’ to this force, this internal ’must’w (Rank, 1936/1978a, p. 54) of life, in full awareness of the suffering, horror, and death that existence has in store for us all? ”How are [we] able to live in a world where we are all alone,” asks Rollo May, ”where we all die?” (Rabinowitz, Good, & Cozad, 1989, p. 439). How, in other words, do we muster the courage to choose that which is also absolutely determined: our lives? S0ren Kierkegaard, whose writings Rank studied as an adolescent (Taft, 1958, p. 37), once asked perhaps the most absurd yet most comical question of all:
Who am I? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? . . . And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint? . . . How did it come about that I became guilty? Or am I not guilty? Why am I so called in all human tongues? (Kierkegaard, 1843/1946, pp. 114-115)
Thrown out of the womb into life kicking and mewling, how do we find the courage to deliberately ”affirm the existence forced on us by fate” (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 65), affirm the godlike but painful consciousness loaned to us, without our asking, as a strange gift from the Beyond? The idea of fate ”perhaps rests on the fact of our biological existence” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 87), a fact so improbable, so unfathomable, that it passes all human understanding.
In neurosis, the living energy of the individual ”manifests itself as being fate,” a denial of freedom and responsibility and a living death: Although ”the individual is at once creator and creature, [in
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neurosis] the creative expression of will is a negative one, resting on the denial of the creator role” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 87). On the other hand, great artists, scientists, and writers seem to come closest to living fully, ”making fate” rather than ”being fate” (p. 88; italics added). They take into themselves all of creation, and then throw it out again in the creation of a new cosmos, now refashioned in their image, living themselves out in creative production. ”The most that any of us can seem to do,” according to Ernest Becker (1973), ”is to fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force” (p. 285).
Against the ”repetition compulsion” of biological sexuality, Rank pitted the human creative impulse, the equally powerful ”drive” for newness and difference, for production not just reproduction: a lifelong, never-completed process that is balanced precariously on the boundary of nonexistence. It is ”only in the individual act of will,” said Rank (1936/1978b) in Will Therapy, that ”we have the unique phenomenon of spontaneity, the establishing of a new primary cause” (p. 44). And with the emergence of consciousness, the full awareness of self, every human being, like Adam, begins ”a new series of causes” (p. 44).
In his titanic, superhuman struggle to wrest meaning out of the mysterium tremendum, Freud, awed by the fearsome power and irrationality of sex, came to interpret all mortals as ”like,” reducible to the same unconscious sexual desires, to drive. The human being, he said, is nothing but ”an appendage to his germ-plasm” (S. Freud, 1914/1958d, p. 123). Freud never tired of repeating that I, das ich, do not live; rather it, das es, lives me (Menaker, 1982, p. 42). But, in a strange twist, Freud’s ”fear of the unconscious, that is, of the life-force itself, from which we all seem to recoil, [led him] to an over-estimation of the rational mind,” said Rank (1941/1958), led him to the supremely positivist view that rational understanding ”would calm the fear” (p. 277). Ridden with angst and guilt, Freud, who is reported to have thought about death every day of his life (Schur, 1972), seems to have swung back and forth, eternally, from all to nothing and nothing to all. This paradox ”betrays itself,” said Rank (1941/1958), ”in the basic axiom of psychoanalysis, a mechanistic theory of life according to which all mental processes and emotional reactions are determined by the Unconscious, that is, by something which in itself is unknown and undeterminable” (p. 13).
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104 Rogers, Rank, and ”The Beyond”
When Freud prophesied that uwo es war, soil ich werden,” he was, in a sense, overvaluing both unconscious, ”the it,” and conscious, ”the F—that is, the intellectual ”insight” into the sexual ”cause” of neurosis that is the goal of psychoanalytic therapy. ”The over-valuation of the unconscious would then be explained by a more or less strong feeling of guilt, such as is felt by every productive type; and the over-valuation of the conscious would be due to a desire to magnify and exalt oneself—as the other is due to the… tendency to minimize” (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 424). We should not be too surprised to discover that Freud, one of the most creative thinkers of all time, understood only too well both the grandiosity and the absurdity of his causa-sui project. ”I do everything only for the cause, which again, is basically my own,” he told Ferenczi. ”I proceed thoroughly egoistically* (Brabant et al., 1993, p. 33). ”Mocking laughter or immortality or both” would be the verdict of posterity, predicted Freud with uncanny accuracy on each count (Brabant et al., 1993, p. 243).
”I WAS BORN BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY”
Psychoanalysis is not the only science that makes sex the ”cause” of everything. Tb account for the arrival on the planet of a new human being, molecular biology asserts, with experimental proof, that sexual intercourse causes two sets of germ cells—called ”mother” and ”father”—to fuse their nuclei and melt down into nothingness. From the ruins of these two germ cells emerges a new germ plasm, like the Phoenix arising from its ashes to start another life. At bottom, the trauma of birth, Rank (1924/1994) conceded, is ”derived from the germ plasm” (p. 188). But is sexual intercourse the ”cause” of existence? Analogously, is art a derivative of biology? How does one build a bridge between a biological impulse common to all men and women and the production, say, of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, an astonishing and never-to-be-repeated masterpiece? Did Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel or was the work done, somehow, by a derivative of the sex drive—an impersonal ”compromise formation” of biological vectors, intrapsychic forces, and defense mechanisms? ”One is almost tempted to say,” Rank (1932/1989) mused inArt and Artist, ”that the sexual act was made ’creative’ by comparison with the generation of fire, and not that the generation of fire needed to be sexualized” (p. 174). New
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life is the mating of two mysteries or, more precisely, two sets of a trillion mysteries each. Each new arrival on the planet is an unthought known, emerging out of its chemical solution from nowhere and nothing.
The fiery ”meeting” of sperm and egg, two specks of cosmic dust melting into each other deep inside the oceanic vastness of the feminine, is insufficient to explain the creation of new human life, much less the creation of art (Schneider, 1990, p. 102). There is something left over to explain.
”Too limited a meaning has been placed upon the sexual experience,” Rank once told Anais Nin. ”In psychoanalysis we still see the consequences of this, in the fallacy that because sex is obviously biologically fundamental, it must also play the leading role” (Nin,
1966, p. 292, italics added). Although Rank did not disdain sexuality, he was too absorbed in aesthetic problems—especially the problems of creativity and inhibition of will—to reduce the incalculable variety of human beings to one common denominator, biology ”Will people ever learn,” asked Rank (1941/1958) in Beyond Psychology, written just before he died in October 1939, ”that there is no other equality possible than the equal right of every individual to become and be himself, which actually means to accept his own difference and have it accepted by others?” (p. 267).
”I was born beyond psychology and want to die beyond it,” Rank jotted on a note dated June 1939, ”but first and foremost, I want to live beyond it—and formerly it has been in my way” (Rank, 1939). There is something beyond psychology. Beyond science. Beyond the germ plasm. There is the ”inexplicable Remainder’ ” of creativity (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 63). ”The DNAI got from my mother differs by about one-tenth of one percent, or about 3,000,000 nucleotides, from the DNA I got from my father,” according to R C. Lewontin (1992), the distinguished Harvard biologist, ”and I differ by about that much from any other human being” (p. 35). This, then, is the ”New,” different from all other germ cells that ever came before it or will ever come after it. As both Otto Rank and Carl Rogers understood, it is difference not sexuality that is the fundamental problem of human existence. ”The mere fact of difference,” said Rank (1936/1978b), ”in other words, the existence of our own will as opposite, unlike, is the basis for the [self-] condemnation which manifests itself as inferiority or guilt feeling” (p. 56). Will and guilt are doubles. ”How did it come about that I,” wondered the eternally lonely Kierkegaard (1843/1946), ”became guilty?” (p. 115).
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106 Rogers, Rank, and ”The Beyond”
Like great artists, Rank and Rogers spent their most productive years ”negotiating with the problem of the Beyond.” Negotiating, on a microcosmic level, by means of the countless ”births” they ”midwived” in the consulting room, the countless differences they ”prized” empathically. But also negotiating, in a macrocosmic sense, by means of their profound appreciation of the potential for transcendence possible in empathic understanding—where microcosm meets macrocosm, the human meets the spiritual.
’Where it was,” said Freud, proclaiming the psychoanalytic triumph of a masculine ego over the oceanic unconscious, ”I shall be.” Where it was, said Rank, balancing the will to individuate with the equally vital need for love, I-Thou shall be. ”The ego needs the Thou,” according to Rank (1941/1958), ”in order to become a Self (p. 290). Human beings are able to live in the spirit, as Martin Buber knew so well, only by deep sharing. Paradoxically, in the ”meeting” of I and Thou, always fleeting and elusive, we may for a moment surrender the lonely burden of difference, surrender to the indescribable, to the awesome splendor and bigness of Creation, to ”the ALL” (Rank, 1936/1978b, p. 155)—and, if recognition is mutual, receive ourselves back, renewed by our temporary brush with the numinous. ”[We] have yielded up [our] mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling,” wrote Rank (1932/1989, p. 110) in Art and Artist. ”It is more than a matter of the passing identification of two individuals, it is the potential restoration of a union with the Cosmos, which once existed and was then lost” (p. 113).
To be born twice, in a spiritual sense, is surely no more miraculous than to be born once. I cannot help but feel, therefore, that long after 1939 the spirit of Otto Rank was alive in the mind, heart, and soul of Carl Rogers, scientist and mystic (O’Hara, 1995 [this issue]).
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Brabant, E., Falzeder E., & Giampieri-Deutsch, P. (Eds.). (1993). The correspondence ofSigmund Freud and Sdndor Ferenczi: Vol. 1, 1908-1914. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Evans, R. (1975). Carl Rogers: The man and his ideas. New York: E. P. Button.
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