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Rank as Prophet If mysticism is our “Yes” to life, prophecy is our “No” to life’s imposters. Rabbi Heschel defines the primary work of the prophet as “interference.” Rank is constantly interfering, constantly being prophet. He interferes with psychology and interferes with the modern era’s biases against mysticism and against indigenous wisdom and against spirituality itself. Indeed, Rank combines his mysticism with his prophecy in the very title of his last work, Beyond Psychology. For prophecy—interference—and mysticism—experience of transcendence or the “beyond”—both take us beyond psychology. Rank, always the prophet, also translates “beyond” into critical thinking about culture. Not only must we move “beyond psychology” but beyond rationality as we saw above. And beyond patriarchy or masculine ideology--women he warns us should find their own psychology and not borrow Freud’s which is man’s “last attempt to control nature this time his own.” This in his essay on “Feminine Psychology and Masculine Ideology”. He calls us beyond anthropocentrism by his love of cosmos and the macrocosm and by his call for “reverence” for animals and he calls us beyond the hubris of the modern era, the arrogance toward indigenous peoples. He calls artists to move beyond the “art mania” of a culture that ignores the true roots of beauty and creativity. He calls us beyond boredom, back to wonder, beyond adultism, back to healthy child-likeness. He practices what he preaches when he signs his letters as “Huck” as in Huck Finn whose childhood he believes is worth all of us remembering. He calls us beyond neurosis, beyond the artiste manque as he calls us to our authentic will, i.e. choice to create. The prophet, says American philosopher William Hocking, is “the mystic in action.” We have seen Rank as mystic, as champion of the Unio Mystica, of Speaking the Unspeakable, of the Irrational, of the Beyond, of the Now, of Letting Go. Rank is also a mystic in action, a prophet who chose time and again to “interfere.” Being a mystic in a rationalistic culture that dreads the mystic is itself interfering with that culture. Therefore we have already seen Rank in his role as prophet insofar as we saw him championing mysticism and as we saw him moving beyond anthropocentrism to ecological awareness, “all our relations.” We listed many of the “beyonds” that he was committed to either explicitly or implicitly. We know the story of the price he paid for his commitment to a bigger view of the world and of the psyche than Freud and his followers were willing to admit. He had to go “beyond Freud,”—a term he used himself --beyond his mentor and friend and father-figure and this was never easy for him. Indeed, it cost him his marriage as his wife stayed in the Freudian camp. Rank’s story parallels that of other prophets: He was not honored in his own village. Indeed, he was vilified. But he did not respond in kind. He never attacked Freud personally nor his followers, even though they attacked him. Nor did his anger and hurt get projected onto his enemies. Nor did it fester within him causing blame and bitterness. There was no bitterness in Rank and this testifies to his greatness of soul. Indeed, his call to let go of the hero and become one’s own was a call he himself heeded. (The theological word for “hero” is “saint.”) I believe Rank was a holy man as well as a spiritual genius because he stayed free of bitterness and found non-violent ways to deal with his anger.) Rank, though not a practicing Jew, was always faithful to the heart of Jewish spirituality and that is, in my opinion, the marriage of mysticism (our Yes to life in spite of all its obstacles) and prophecy (our interference or “No” to injustice and falsity that prevents life from unfolding). The two impulses blend beautifully in Rank’s work. Consider, for example, how he is calling for a love of life when he insists that the fear of death is preventing us from living fully. Or when he names the neurotic impulse as using our creativity falsely employed to escape life and when he dares challenge the artist to put more effort into living an artful life and renounce ‘objets d’art’ if needs be to accomplish this. Or when he, in line with the Biblical teaching that we are all made in the image and likeness of the creator, says we are all co-creators and must get on with our task. Or when he reminds us that Marx’s success was in appealing to the irrational or hope among the world’s poor. The fact that the first chapter of his final book is on “Psychology and Social Change” and the seventh chapter calls women to create their own psychology and move beyond patriarchal ideologies are proof positive of his commitment to interfere. His courage is as real as his analytical depth and breadth. So too is the fact that the social workers in America, people who work daily with the poor and neglected of society, responded so warmly and deeply to Rank’s message. The Schools of Social Work in Philadelphia and in New York welcomed him to their cause. Rank’s prophetic courage and insight is further evidenced in his willingness to take on psychology as it was practiced up to his time, that is to say in the person of his mentor and friend Freud. To bring this about he himself invokes on more than one occasion the likeness of himself to Einstein. He seeks an Einstinian revolution in psychology, one that moves from so-called “objectivity” a la Newton to one of relationship and relativity a la Einstein. This conscious effort to move from modern science to a postmodern one on Rank’s part is clearly a work of interference. Rank does not mince words about the strength demanded in the task of interfering. “In The Trauma of Birth (1924), extending Freudian determinism from object to subject—from patient to therapist, psychoanalytically, speaking—I jolted Freud’s ‘physical’ standpoint by analyzing the relationship (his italics) between research subject and observer in the analytic situation itself. This relativistic orientation led in my more recent publications to a relativity-based psychology in which there is no longer a fixed position for the observer—that is, consciousness—but only the moment-to-moment dynamic relation of the twosome.” He extends this Einstinian stretch to the very definition of psychology on his final page of Psychology and the Soul when he declares: “Psychology has less to do with facts than does physics…[Psychology] is a science of relationships—a way of observing relationship and relativities…..It is in essence a science of relations…” Instead of isolating the individual to yield certain “scientific results,” we ought to acknowledge that “all living psychology is relationship psychology” whether the relationship be between two persons or between multiple persons as in the family or larger social groups. Here Rank is naming the very essence of a feminist philosophy and applying it to his profession: That essence being relationship. Rank is to be commended for his daring to apply critical judgment and interference to his own profession and his own livelihood. Many are the intellectuals who critique every system but their own, every structure but the one that is feeding them. Rank dared to critique his very livelihood and in the process paid the price of a prophet without succumbing to regret or guilt. To speak cosmology in a modern world is prophetic for it stands up to anthropocentrism. Rank’s insistence on micro/macrocosm consciousness is deeply prophetic therefore. In a lecture delivered in 1938 at the University of Minnesota, Rank repeats his call for a feminine psychology and he adds the issue of children’s neglect as well. “We do not possess a real psychology of the woman nor do we understand the child psychologically.” What we have in psychology “is in essence man-made: that is to say, man has projected his own psychology into the woman and into the child.” How ahead of his time Rank was in pointing to what we can call today Adultism—the projection of adult attitudes into children. How far this has taken us can be observed as we learn that Macdonald Corporation for example addresses its advertising promotions to three year olds!30 And then the dominant culture wonders why obesity is stalking our children. Instead, Rank suggests that adults ought to learn from the children (Jesus offered the same subversive advice). The child is more mystical, more at home with the irrational. “The child lives mentally and emotionally on an entirely different plane: his world is not a world of logic, causality, and rationalism. It is a world of magic, a world in which imagination and creative will reign—internal forces that cannot be explained in terms of scientific psychology.” To honor the child’s wisdom is to recover a respect for nature itself. “The child lives in a world of magic, where no logical or rational—that is, man-made—laws govern, but where the irrationality of nature herself, of which the woman is still so much a part, predominates.” Instead of projection of adult ideologies into children, Rank proposes a radical alternative: The way of love, of a love that is more than sentimental and anthropocentric. We cannot remove the child’s fear or insecurity, but we can “alleviate [them] by love, a love that connects the tragically separated individual again with cosmic life” (italics his). Of course, for this to happen, adults must themselves possess a relationship to the cosmos. Rank continues: “Instead of psychologizing the child, we should respect his irrational nature and learn from him to accept it humbly in ourselves as well. We are not in the least more secure than he is, we are not less irrational at bottom. All we do is pretend to be; that’s our tragedy, our false heroism.” Rank and the Creation Spirituality Tradition The creation spirituality tradition is found among indigenous peoples the worldover and is the oldest tradition in the Bible tracing its roots there to the J Source in the Hebrew Bible as well as to the prophets and to Wisdom literature. It is the tradition of the historical Jesus who not only knew wisdom literature but also grew up in the richest land of Israel, Galilee, and found there the food for his parables all of which invoke creation’s beauty and relationships (seeds and bushes, fishes and sheep and goats, wheat and chaff, birds nesting and falling from their nest, the beauty of lilies in the field and more). The creation spiritual tradition looks on the spiritual journey as happening in four paths, paths that intersect and repeat themselves in ever advancing spirals of fullness and consciousness. (These four paths are in conscious distinction from the three paths of Purgation, Illumination and Union that were invoked by patriarchal Christianity that dominated religious language for 1700 years. These three paths conveniently exclude the role of justice, the experience of joy and pleasure, and creativity.) The four paths of the creation spiritual journey are named as follows: 1. Via Positiva: The experience of joy, delight, wonder at creation in its fullness. Clearly Rank is at home with this experience, the “marvel at creation itself.” But we ought not to underestimate the effort it takes in the midst of culture’s many betrayals. In fact, in Rank’s view, the “new hero” will be one committed to the via positiva: “The new hero, still unknown, is the one who can live and love in spite of our mal du siecle.” 2. Via Negativa: The experience of darkness, nothingness, suffering but also silence. The proper response is letting be and letting go. Suffering becomes our teacher. As does silence. Rank speaks of the via negativa by trusting the one suffering (the client in therapy) to undergo his or her pain and to be with it. He also countenances, as we have seen, the principle of continuous separations or letting go’s. And he insists that all difference need not be negatively conceived. The Via Negativa is, among other things, about accepting difference. The neurotic refuses to let go, “he is unable to accept this—his difference—positively. He is compelled by a deep-rooted self-denial to interpret his difference negatively, as inferiority.” The via negativa includes letting go of denial and self-hatred and fear of being different. 3. Via Creativa. From the filling of Path One and the Emptying of Path Two there is born “breakthrough” (Eckhart’s word) or what Rank would call Rebirth and connecting to our primal will which is our capacity for creativity. “The individual is both creator and creature,” declares Rank , but for the neurotic “the creative expression of will is a negative one, resting on the denial of the creator role.” But creativity is a choice, as all morality is. We face life and death every day and we are free to choose on a daily basis. “I put before you life and death—choose life” says the Scriptures. (Deuteronomy 30.19) So also says Rank who declares: “Do not be reluctant to give birth.” Creativity becomes the linchpin to Rank’s therapeutic method offering the patient “a much more active role than being merely an object upon whom the therapist operates, like a surgeon. Thus, my concept allows for operation of the patient’s own will as the most constructive force in the therapeutic process.” And by will we all know Rank means the choice to give birth. I have written in greater depth about Rank’s contribution to a spirituality of art in “Rank and the Sp. Journey” and Creativity but let me cite just one confession by Rank on this subject, a subject so dear to him that it came up in his very first book, The Artist. “What I called the artist in that book was something other than the man who actually paints. I meant by artist the creative personality….I emphasized not the biological and eternal factors but this inner self of the individual, whatever you want to call it: something in the individual himself that is creative, that is impelling, that is not taken in from without but grows somehow within.” Compare Eckhart: “The truth does not come from outside in but from inside out and passes through an inner form.” 4. Via Transformativa. The proper use of our creativity and all our delight, suffering, silence and solitude is to channel those energies into compassion and justice-making, into healing and celebration. That is the prophetic work par excellence: Rank interferes with sadness and degradation, with abuse and soul-loss through what he called “empathy” and “identification” in the therapeutic process. “Correct understanding is one of empathy based on identification, whereas intellectual understanding is again projection to a certain degree, a compelling of the other to our own thought, our own interpretation.” Surely empathy and identification are forms of compassion. Rank practiced this and spoke of it: “Love abolishes egoism, it merges the self in the other to find it again enriched in one’s own ego.” All psychologists—and indeed all workers—felt the original call to this noble vocation of compassion. The trick is to get it back. Thus we see that for many reasons Rank stands out as a mystic and prophet in the creation-centered tradition, a genius in spirituality as much as in psychology. Conclusion Rank observed that “new personality types are created during social and spiritual crises of religious, political or economic origin.” I believe Rank was such a type. While writing of Rank’s spiritual genius at California’s coast, I am witness to the blue sky reflecting the deep blue ocean on this stunning and sunny August afternoon. I adopt his words that his work “will flourish under Western skies” to mean that at our quite new University of Creation Spirituality located in Oakland, California under “western skies,” his work is indeed flourishing as we commit ourselves to teaching lessons of mysticism and the new cosmology by incorporating the beyond and the irrational through a pedagogy that includes creativity, ritual, body prayer and art as meditation, as well as intellectual study--all for the purpose of building up prophets. Especially prophets willing to stand up in their own professions and speak out, interfere, heal and infiltrate. Like Rank did. Rank’s teaching and his example will inspire us always. Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology (New York: Dover, 1941), 245. Otto Rank, Modern Education, M. Moxon, trans., (New York: Knopf, 1932), 376. Ibid., 44. Matthew Fox, Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1991), 59. Beyond Psychology, 250. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 289. Ibid. Ibid., 23, 15, 278. Matthew Fox, Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 119f. Otto Rank, Art and Artist (New York: Knopf, 1932), 128. Cited in Robert Kramer, “The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy: Carl Rogers, Otto Rank, and ‘The Beyond,’” in Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 35, no. 4, Fall 1995, 95. Art and Artist, 110. Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth (New York: Dover, 1924), 177. Art and Artist, 113. See Fox, Passion For Creation, 77, 214-218. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 184, 193, 195. Otto Rank, Psychology and the Soul, Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman, trans. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 127. Otto Rank, A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures, Robert Kramer, trans. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 268. Fox, The Passion For Creation, 113. Rank, A Psychology of Difference, 270. Ibid. See Matthew Fox, Prayer: A Radical Response to Life (New York: Jeremy Tarcher, 2001). Rank, A Psychology of Difference, 258. Italics and caps his. Ibid., 116, 242. Rank, Psychology of Soul, 113. Rank, A Psychology of Difference, 127f.; 95. Ibid., 270f. Ibid., 271. 30 See Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (New York: Perennial, 2002). Ibid., 272. Ibid., 273. See Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (New York: Jeremy Tarcher, 2001). Rank, A Psychology of Difference, 268. Cited in Kramer, “The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy,” 103. Rank, A Psychology of Difference, 268. Ibid., 242. For more on Rank and the spirituality of creativity see Matthew Fox, “Otto Rank on the Artistic Journey as a Spiritual Journey, and the Spiritual Journey as an Artistic Journey” in Matthew Fox, Wrestling with the Prophets (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 199-214 and also Matthew Fox, Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet (New York: Jeremy Tarcher, 2002), Ibid., 209. See also page 94. Cited in Kramer, “The Birth of Client-Centered Therapy,” 95. |
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