Sara Ekenstierna joins a line of fascinating speakers at “Modernism Remodelled: A Transdisciplinary Conference” February 28-March 1, 2026: Oxford University and Online. Organized by London Arts-Based Research Centre.
Abstract: This paper explores the pioneering psychoanalyst Otto Rank’s “creative personality type” through the lens of Frida Kahlo’s work. It suggests that Kahlo epitomizes the artist type in Rank’s theory of personality, by approaching life with creativity, intentionality and self-determination, and by courageously transcending the standard map, embracing difference, and turning pain into art. Rank uses the words “art” and “artist” both to describe their obvious meaning and in the broadest sense “the art of living”. Self-becoming, to Rank, is a dual process: A struggle between, on the one side, independence and self-sufficiency, and on the other, relationships and connectivity. Art is born out of the tension. The artist type is the creator who transforms the inevitable conflict inherent in life and in each person, into art or vital living. While the artist is a self-actualizer, art (or creativity) is at-once a “unio mystica” that enables the deeper experience of the dissolution of the separate I, the “release from difference which leads to the feeling of unity with the self, with the other, with the cosmos”. Rank was 21 years old when he met Freud in Vienna in 1905 and became his close collaborator. As Rank’s ideas gradually challenged the mechanical view of organic life that was introduced by Darwin, and which predominated mainstream psychology and classical psychoanalysis, Rank was by the late 1920s rejected by the psychoanalytic community. While the classical view portrayed humans as products of a deterministic environment, Rank sees us as co-participators in the great drama of creation. While Rank is greatly influential to modern therapy he has also been overlooked. There is, however, currently a resurgence of interest in Rank, suggesting that 21st century psychology is set to seize the chance to investigate what is only just beginning to emerge in the field, and what Rank proposed already a century ago. Author: Sara Ekenstierna November 17, 2025