Faith & Spirit Quote by Otto Rank

Rank is trying to smuggle the sacred back into modern life without dragging along the old clergy. By redefining "soul" as "creativity and mysticism", he recasts spirituality as an inner human capacity rather than a doctrinal account of the universe. It's a tactical pivot: if the 20th century is going to distrust churches, monarchs, and metaphysics, it might still trust the felt intensity of making art, of encountering something larger than the ego. Rank is betting that the future belongs to experience, not catechism.

The phrasing is deliberately prophetic, almost manifesto-like. "New meaning", "foundation", "new psychological type", "new civilization" reads less like clinical psychology than a recruitment pitch for a post-Freudian self. That's the subtext: orthodox psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on pathology, determinism, and drives, is too cramped to explain what people actually hunger for once basic stability is achieved. Rank, famous for emphasizing will, birth trauma, and the artist as a psychological exemplar, wants therapy to graduate from managing neurosis to cultivating creative agency.

Context matters: between world wars, mass politics and mechanization were shredding inherited identities, while psychology was rising as a secular authority. Rank is answering that vacuum with a daring claim: civilization isn't rebuilt by better institutions alone, but by a remodeled inner life. The mysticism here isn't incense-and-ritual so much as awe, surrender, and meaning-making - a counterweight to the era's cold systems. It's utopian, yes, but also diagnostic: when the old "soul" stops persuading, culture will either invent a new one or go looking for gods with worse ideas.