The Creation Spirituality Lineage Calling All Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Justice Makers, Cosmic Thinkers, Earth Keepers Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox |
A Great Book from 2025 on
a Great Spiritual Teacher—Otto Rank By Matthew Fox 1/3/2026 |
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 |
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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. |
Matthew Fox reflects on Otto Rank's words regarding the role of the artist in
witnessing the conflicts and struggles of our world and society, and birthing new visions thereby. | 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 |
The “Secret Committee” dedicated to overseeing the development of psychoanalysis and protecting Freud’s legacy, 1922 (l-r): Otto Rank, Sigmund Freud, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Sándor Ferenczi, Ernest Jones, and Hanns Sachs. Wikimedia Commons. |
influenced American social work through the “strengths-based” approach formulated by Rank in the mid-1920s. 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? |
Responses are welcomed. To add your comment, or read other comments and enter into dialogue, please click HERE to go to our website and scroll down to the Comments field. Related Reading 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 Books and More by Matthew and Friends! Be sure to check out Matthew's new store at MatthewFox.org, now offering books, recorded courses old and new, and special events... and don't
miss our growing collection of books endorsed by Matthew on Bookshop.org! |
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