Robert Kramer’s The Birth of Relationship Therapy: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank

By Daniel Liechty | July 21, 2021

A new book that will be of interest to many readers of this website is The Birth of Relationship Therapy: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank, by Robert Kramer (Psychosozial-Verlag, 2019). Otto Rank was an early protégé of Sigmund Freud, but in the middle of the 1920s, he and Freud had a falling out over ideas presented in Rank’s book, The Trauma of Birth. Rank’s emphasis on separation (symbolized by birth separation from the mother’s body) as a chief source of anxiety conflicted enough with Freud’s Oedipal conflict as the central source of anxiety that Freud perceived Rank’s book as a challenge and rejection of psychoanalysis. Rank was dethroned as Freud’s right hand man and chief collaborator, and like others whom Freud perceived as having challenged him, he cut Rank off and never spoke with him directly again.

Rank soon moved from Vienna to Paris, and from there made several lengthy lecture and teaching trips to the United States. He was particularly welcomed at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, where he had considerable influence on emerging psychosocial and existentialist approaches to counseling and psychotherapy at Penn and elsewhere. Two American pioneers in the field most deeply influenced by Rank were Rollo May and, as Kramer makes clear in this book, Carl Rogers. It is interesting to note that the names of both May and Rogers are much more recognizable to current students and young practitioners than the name of Rank himself. This is one reason why a book like this one is so important in filling out the background of current approaches to humanistic, existential psychological theory, which is, of course, the stream in which Ernest Becker, as he worked out his ideas about mortality and death anxiety, also found himself swimming, somewhat to his own surprise.

A core concept of humanistic, existential approaches to counseling and psychotherapy is that we experience something of awe and astonishment at the very fact that we exist and are alive in the first place. Becker referred to this as simply our awareness of existence, which he took to be something rather uniquely human, given that it takes enormous brain power to become self-aware at all – that is, to mentally stand apart from oneself and reflect back on oneself as an object of contemplation. But, as Rank taught, this sense of awe and astonishment about the very fact of existence also immerses one directly into the underlying rumble of anxiety, because once you know you exist, you have to try to make sense of your existence and all of those questions – Who am I? Why am I here? Where did I come from? What can I expect of life? To whom or what am I responsible? – immediately impose themselves on one’s consciousness. Another core concept of humanistic, existential approaches to counseling and psychotherapy is that it is exactly how one relates to this anxiety that forms one’s core personality and sense of symbolic self. Working through these kinds of questions in a therapeutic context must include the fact that both therapists and client are simultaneously working their lives out in the context of the therapy, and hence the key paradigm for any therapeutic context is one of Relationship.

And there we have it. Although Otto Rank had his own terminology, which was sometimes a bit obscure to American audiences, these are clearly ideas that he passed along to Carl Rogers, Rollo May and, through them (we might add) to current leading lights in this approach such as Kirk Schneider. Robert Kramer’s book is not the first to point out these continuities between Rank and later, more popular theories, but Kramer certainly draws these lines of connection as tightly, succinctly and clearly as any other piece of writing I have seen. This is a worthy contribution to the field that deserves wide attention.

Published in Germany, the book is available in paperback through any US bookseller or Amazon or as an ebook download from the German publisher at https://www.psychosozial-verlag.de/2769