Abstract

Otto Rank, now a disfavored figure in psychoanalytic circles, was Sigmund Freud's "adopted son" during the eighteen most formative years of the psychoanalytic movement. Will Therapy is his unfathomed and generally rejected psychotherapy theory. This project maintains that Rank's work is not properly understood within the compass of clinical psychoanalysis. It reconsiders the formative personal and intellectual forces of Rank's psychology and exposes the underlying aspects of his clinical theory which are shaped by the agenda of his original mentor, Friedrich Nietzsche. This intellectual agenda, which is part of the larger cultural project of fin-de-siecle Vienna, is also deeply influenced by the "politics" of Rank's dynamic history. This dissertation therefore gets its essential structure from the events of Rank's personal life. ;The agenda, summarily stated, is self-creation in a world without radical transcendence. Rank's major works up to and including Will Therapy, are re-read in view of this concern. By this reading the essence of pathology in Rankian theory is nihilism as a psychological state. Will Therapy articulates in clinical/philosophical language the crisis of the self that results from the "death of God", the failure of all ideological genealogy, and the resulting incredulity toward all metanarratives, notably psychoanalysis. The essential therapeutic in Will Therapy is power and the reinstatement of illusion. Rank is deeply influenced by Nietzsche's observation that the world is a work of art, aesthetically self-created. The conscious mind, the Ego, creates "truth and reality." The neurotic is a failed artist: artiste manque. In Will Therapy, the transfiguration of the self hinges on the power to be one's own creator, and to "will the world." It is the view of the Will to Power as art and faith. Rank's philosophy of reflection as well as his philosophy of individual history exhibit the principle of deconstruction and an ontology of the present. This methodology properly locates him in the tradition of postmodern philosophers