With one year ending and another dawning, it is customary to reflect on the outgoing year. One sees articles, for example, on “the best movies of 2025 nobody knows of.”
In today’s and Monday’s DM, I would like to meditate on what I consider one of the most important spiritual books of 2025 that few people have heard of.
I speak of Robert Kramer’s book, Otto Rank and the Creation of Modern Psychotherapy. As an act of transparency, I confess that Kramer and I taught a course together on Rank at UCS, and he invited me to write the Foreword to the book.
Those who know my work on Creation Spirituality and the prominent role that the Via Creativa plays in it know how dear Rank’s work is to me.
Like so many others who have studied Ernest Becker’s award-winning book, The Denial of Death, and his last work, Escape From Evil, it was Becker who first introduced me to Rank. When he said that Rank’s book, Art and Artist, was “the most important book of his life,” I sat up and took notice. I wrote a lengthy review of it back in 1979, titled “Otto Rank on the Artistic Journey as a Spiritual Journey, the Spiritual Journey as an Artistic Journey,” and have been living with Rank ever since.
The following year, 1980, I published my major book on Meister Eckhart, Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart’s Creation Spirituality in New Translation (today called Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart), containing 37 of his principal sermons, including, of course, nine sermons on Creativity or the Via Creativa. I found Rank and Eckhart very much brothers in communion of thought around the pivotal role that creativity and also the quest for justice play in our spiritual life.
Robert Kramer has been studying and teaching Otto Rank for many decades. This book marks a culmination of his findings and deep research into Rank’s relationship with Sigmund Freud, which began so powerfully but ended tragically. As Kramer puts it, Rank was Freud’s “closest associate in Vienna from 1906 until 1926,” and it was he who eventually “created the principles of modern psychotherapy, which focus on the quality of the therapist-client relationship.”
Kramer observes that “if the 20th century was the century of Freud, the 21st is shaping up to be that of Rank,” who established that “the single most important lesson the psychotherapist must learn is that ‘it is the relationship that heals.’”
And that Carl Rogers, whose work was “a major influence on social work practice,” derived his relationship therapy “directly from Rank during a weekend encounter in 1936.” It was also Rank who emphasized “short-term rather than endless therapy” and thus “revolutionized the way mental health professions practice their craft today.” In 2024, psychoanalyst Ellie Ragland commented, “Rank has triumphed over Freud in America” because both psychiatrists and psychotherapists “use the short sessions Rank recommended.”
Kramer tells the “unknown story of why Freud’s ‘boiling rage’ led to Rank’s” leaving the inner circle. They died in 1939, one month apart, Freud at 83 and Rank at 55. He recounts how Rank called for a psychology of difference and called for the “creative will” or unique life force to come forth from all persons. And how Rank influenced American social work through the “strengths-based” approach formulated by Rank in the mid-1920’s. How self-leadership follows.
He recounts Rank’s feminism and how women have responded to his emphasis on the creative will and moved beyond a “masculine ideology” and the fear of “self-actualizations, self-realization, self-leadership.” He cites Rank’s statement that Man is born beyond psychology and he dies beyond it, but he can live beyond it only through vital experience of his own–in religious terms, through revelation, conversion, or rebirth.
Kramer insists that Rank’s insights on human nature shed needed light on “the underlying existential motives for the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere.”* He also offers a very useful annotated bibliography on writings about Otto Rank.
As the most thorough, broad, and fully researched study on Otto Rank ever, this book is a great gift to humankind. After all, it explores one of the greatest spiritual giants of the 20th century.
To be continued.
*Robert Kramer, Otto Rank and the Creation of Modern Psychotherapy, pp. xvii-xxii.
Banner Image: An icon by Luis Prado, representing psychotherapy, against an antique Persian Mashad rug background similar to the coverings on Sigmund Freud’s famed couch. Both images on Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you find insights here from Rank that feed and nurture your own spiritual journey?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
“Otto Rank as Mystic and Prophet in the Creation Spirituality Tradition” on Matthew Fox.org
“Otto Rank on the Artistic Journey as a Spiritual Journey, the Spiritual Journey As an Artistic Journey,” in Wrestling with the Prophets: Essays on Creation Spirituality and Everyday Life, pp. 199-214
“Psychotherapy and the ‘Unio Mystica’: Meister Eckhart Meets Otto Rank” in Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior for Our Times, pp. 139-156
Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society, pp. xxxviii-xli, 113, 173f., 254, 271, 295, 339f., 344. 357
5 thoughts on “A Great Book from 2025 on a Great Spiritual Teacher—Otto Rank”
About two months ago, Matthew, you re-introduced us in one of the webinar series on “Paths to Christ Consciousness” to Otto Rank and this book recommendation about him by Robert Kramer. I bought it and have been enjoying it with its interesting history of Otto Rank and his profound influence on the development of modern psychotherapy, including its creative and spiritual dimensions. As a retired clinical social worker, I remember we were taught the importance of the therapeutic relationship in healing. Carl Jung was another early disciple of Freud who broke away with his deeper research into the collective unconscious and the universal archetypes in understanding the spiritual development and healing of humanity. My personal and spiritual development has also been strongly influenced by the study and experience of three interrelated spiritual traditions — Contemplative, Creation, and Incarnational. In human history, the saints, mystics, prophets, shamans in indigenous cultures, and many good people in our spiritual ancestry have embodied the Living Divine Spirit of LOVE~WISDOM~PEACE~JUSTICE~HEALING~TRANSFORMATION~FREEDOM~DIVERSE ONENESS~COMPASSION… in their inner and communal unique lives potentially available to all of us in Our Unique Eternal Souls incarnating together in Our Human Evolution with the SACRED ONENESS of Our SPIRITUAL MULTIDIMENSIONAL/MULTIVERSE COSMOS….
Rank vs. Freud is a facet of the Yang vs. Yin oscillation, like Right vs. Left, Machismo vs. Feminism, or even Republican vs. Democrat. We crave for Yin when the pendulum is on the Yang side, and vice versa. The Chinese YinYang symbol has no “OR” or “AND,” but illustrates two complementary aspects of a dynamic unity. Countless spiritual or poetic writing call for the soul to be “still,” i.e. for the suppression of the coordinating conjunction between what Buber called I and Thou. For most of us, such stillness is only temporary:
“…But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.” [TS Eliot]
I have been reading your Daily Reflections for many years. I appreciate your holistic approach to Spirituality, including the Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine, as well as lifting up the importance of creation-based spirituality. Thank you. However, it seems increasingly so, that you begin your reflections with how you are
connected or how you know the person you are writing about, and how your books have shared similar understanding. I would appreciate if you would begin with the chosen person or topic and put aside your
personal connections, including the significance of your books.
Begin with the person or topic you have chosen and leave yourself out. We are aware of your many books and the significance of them over time.
I just completed the 6 month Paths to Christ Consciousness and I haven’t had a chance to express how deeply grateful and sustained I feel by the teachings Matthew Fox shared there.
A chance to spend more time with readings and texts that I felt familiar with and have a chance to sink deeper into them, and an opportunity to expand my library into writings that I had underappreciated, or not considered before.
I am especially grateful for the recent discussion of Rank who I read in a cursory way several decades ago when I was primarily focused on becoming an individual psychotherapist. Now that my work has shifted almost entirely toward group and community resilience work, returning to Rank has been shoring up my foundations, helping me study and teach Liberation Psychology. I’ve been working through “Beyond Psychology” for a project with another colleague who has been a long time liberation psychology practitioner – and Rank is so useful in grounding Hillman, Watkins, Baró, Soelle and others writing in this space.
I feel foolish that I left his works unread and under-utilized in my stacks for so long.
Grateful to you Matthew for all of your teaching and sharing of resources.
This is a link to a recent essay about psychotherapy and Will, contemplating Rank:
https://www.whatashrinkthinks.com/campaigns/view-campaign/R7cE13h4mjIUmPtYJkW68rEOSQZT3ijmlCraDiFAEz8E406eBj7iPi76SlEu0nA3qIAgQCIj7urInPPiQ0pAPrwKCcdOINk8
Dear Fr. Matt,
Thanks for this further reference to Otto Rank, and this new book by Robert Kramer. It is exciting that he knows you and has worked with you, and sees what you see, about Rank’s work with art and spirituality. I look forward to reading it. The interesting thing about what psychotherapy means, not just analysis but HEALING, is what makes me excited about the work. As I think I said in the response to GG, at the interfaith vigil for Peace in Santa Cruz, on New Year’s eve, there were wonderful spiritual guides from each tradition, and a short insightful conversation on the topic of the balance with feminine qualities in the Divine; and the practical difficulties of being a woman studying and trying to be taken seriously in the patriarchal traditional studies. I wanted to tell you that I saw the interview with Omid Safi, at Duke University, about the divine feminine, and his words about the soul “like a baby in the womb of the mother” were so profound. This interview was with Willow Brook, at Wild heart.space. Willow works with Mirabai Starr. He is a very loving and intuitively compassionate and warm person in his way of teaching what he has learned from the Sufi tradition of Muslim faith. The interview is worth hearing!