PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SOUL: A Study of the Origin, Conceptual Evolution, and Nature of the Soul.

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SOUL: A Study of the Origin, Conceptual Evolution, and Nature of the Soul.

James M. Morris

By Otto Rank. Transl. by Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. 176 pp. $29.95

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PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SOUL: A Study of the Origin, Conceptual Evolution, and Nature of the Soul. By Otto Rank. Transl. by Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. 176 pp. $29.95

For 20 years, Otto Rank (1884-1939) was Sigmund Freud’s pupil, colleague, and virtual foster son, until Rank did what sons always do and what Freud of all people should have expected: he rebelled against the father figure. Rank broke with Freud in the mid-1920s—part over Rank’s insistence that all neurosis originates in the trauma of birth—and his subsequent work took Freud’s ideas down paths the master could not walk.

Though it was antithetical to Freud’s scientism and rejection of religion and philosophy, Rank insisted on the fundamental importance of the soul to any account of human psychology. Psychology and the Soul is Rank’s idiosyncratic history of the evolution of humankind’s relationship to the soul and to self-consciousness. He traces the generation of belief in the soul to the clash between the reality of the desire to live forever and the no-less-insistent reality of biological death. The painful collision of the two, and humankind’s refusal to accept the finality of death, strikes in our consciousness a spark of "soul-belief." In varying forms, that belief has endured from the earliest stages of animism and the magic world-view of the primitive through the evolution of complex societies and complicated notions of consciousness.

Psychology is, in essence, the study of the soul. "The object of psychology is not facts," writes Rank, "but ideas created by soulbelief.... Psychology deals only with interpretations of soul phenomena." To be sure, this is not the traditional Christian or religious conception of soul. Indeed, Rank wrote, "the soul may not exist, and, like belief in immortality, may be mankind’s greatest illusion." But illusion has its uses.

Psychology and the Soul is the first complete English translation of a work that Rank published in 1930 (as Seelenglaube und Psychologie). It draws on anthropology, sociology, mythology, religion, philosophy, history, and literature to chart the development of the human psyche. Figures such as Adam and Eve, Homer, Gilgamesh, Lohengrin, Shakespeare, and Faust pop up oddly in the course of the text. In due course, even physics bolsters the argument: the new physics of Rank’s day rejected a rigidly deterministic causality, allowing him to claim for the psyche its dynamic shaping through the force of human will.

This is a short book, but there’s no use pretending it’s an easy one. For all the heroic labors and clarifying notation of the translators (Lieberman is clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the George Washington University School of Medicine; Richter is a professor of foreign languages at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri), the argument often progresses over rocky ground. Still, the book’s antimaterialistic passion makes a compelling counterpoint to the stern biology of our age, and the bounds it sets to what psychoanalysis can claim are justly drawn: "Psychology can no more replace knowledge gained through thought than it can replace religion and morality." In that caution there is the good sense of the Rank who once told an admirer, "Read my books and put them away; read Huckleberry Finn, everything is there."

—James Morris

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