Otto Rank's psychology of will and soul and its spiritual implications for psychotherapeutic theory and practice

In 1941, Otto Rank's book, Beyond Psychology, published posthumously, continued to express his significant departure from the current Freudian views on human growth and development that were then in vogue in the psychoanalytic world.; My aim in this thesis is to prove that Rank's sensitivity to religious experience offers the psychoanalytic practitioner and theorist important areas of clinical assessment often minimized.; In this thesis, I present Rank's major themes on religion and spiritual dynamics that are scattered unsystematically throughout his writing into a collected overview of his “soul psychology,” and thereby present more systematically his thoughts on spiritual and relational dimensions of therapy, especially in terms of will and soul. Rank's wide-ranging references on spiritual themes will be gathered together according to apposite rubrics, such as soul, will, guilt, evil, death, immortality, the double, Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, rebirth, transcendence, mysticism, agape, dreams, and psychotherapy. Rank's emphasis on “soul-force” and the human search for immortality and self-transcendence constitutes an implicit psychology of religion which contains a view towards metaphysics, and this proclivity is drawn out in regard to its relevance toward spiritual assumptions about the human being and society. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...