“Embracing the Ambivalence: Otto Rank’s Complementary Approach and Its Relevance Today” in Journal of Humanistic Psychology

This is an important article. I do not know why Rank has been too often sidelined.

Sara Ekenstierna is making a major contribution by describing the THERAPEUTIC THIRD. And she has cited some key players who often get overlooked: Merleau-Ponty, David Bohm, Ira Progoff — all favorites of mine. She even touches basis with physics! Of course, the DAIMON, WILL and AGENCY are important, and are often overlooked as psychotherapists try to fit their writings into the Procrustean Bed of mainstream psychology and psychiatry.

The second part of Ekenstierna’s article is especially interesting to me because of its emphasis on creativity. The final words “the courage to create” are, of course, the title of a May book, and he has acknowledged Rank’s influence on his thought. Incidentally, I have written about the six Ps of creativity: person, purpose, place, process, product, practicality.  

In Ekenstierna’s discussion of the dialectic, she has noted a possible third aspect. This reminds me of TRIALECTICS, a schema taking a similar approach. Rank’s “fear of dying,” of course was the basis for terror management theory, which has considerable data to back it up. Rank’s three personality types make sense and it is possible to apply his construct empirically. His self-conception has a transpersonal aspect. Grof, one of the originators of Transpersonal Psychology (TP), gives credit to Rank, and Ekenstierna has found other sources as well, such as Martin Buber and William James, probably the very first transpersonal psychologist. His definition of SELF, to me, is transpersonal — where the psyche meets the cosmos.

Finally, I like the way Ekenstierna proposes that there can be something that is an additional dimension of the participation mystique, another anthropological construct.

Stanley Krippner, PhD

 “Problems of the Beyond: Exploring the Holistic Thought of Otto Rank”  in Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

Your [Ekenstierna’s] article is a real breakthrough, because of its wide range of clear competence and the high level of argumentation. The splittings in the history of psychoanalysis are strange phenomena. The background are the limitations of mentality because of our problematic patriarchal history, that we partly overcome by the process of the emancipation of women since the enlightenment. Therefore it is not astonishing that you as a woman is able to write such a clear text without any right or wrong or who is greater or who is smaller and so on.

What is supplementary to your text is that there is a background tradition in Psychoanalysis and beyond relating to Rank, connected with the names of Graber, Fodor, Mott, and others that led to the International Society of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine, www.isppm.de, and to the American society APPPAH, www.birthpsychology.com, under the label „Prenatal Psychology“, see: Klaus Evertz, Ludwig Janus, Rupert Linder „Handbook of Prenatal Psychology“, Springer, New York 2021. On my website www.Ludwig-Janus.de you can see some texts by me on the different aspects of Rank and Prenatal Psychology.

But your article is so essential, because it shows that Rank is the great opener of this field and its wide range. 

Ludwig Janus, Dr. Med.