Carl Rogers meets Otto Rank

Abstract In 1936, Carl Rogers, a child guidance counselor in Rochester, NY, invited Rank, then world-famous, to conduct a weekend introduction to his new relationship therapy. Unfortunately, no record of this event survives. Drawing on Rank’s writings and lectures, and other sources, I reconstruct Rank’s encounter with Rogers, which resulted in Rogers abandoning psychoanalysis to create “client-centered” therapy, adopting a term that Rank had used in a 1935 talk to social workers. In contrast, by focusing on transference, Freud explicitly placed the analyst at the center of therapy. Moreover, because Freud had rejected feelings as irrational, psychoanalysis, according to Rank, could never account for the healing possible within an authentic relationship. Nor could Freud explain the creative will of artists. Creative willing, wrote Rank, is a “temporal representative of the cosmic primal force,” an expression of the evolutionary process unfolding with immeasurable energy and power in the universe.