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He that acknowledges the Son has the Father also.
The severe criticism which Otto Rank made of Freud's theory of the leader is based on the idea that the Son and not the Father is the basis of leadership. There is no lack of evidence to prove the strong element of truth in that idea. But our conclusion from the histories of Heroes and Great Men would be that the interaction of Son and Father elements is a necessary feature of every leader, and that it is the relative proportion of the two elements which determines whether the leader under consideration is a Hero or a “Great Man.” The Hero is primarily a son. The Great Man is primarily a father. The error in Rank's thinking was that he approached the leader problem entirely from the view-point of the rebel Hero. In his book Modern Education, he wrote: (1) “Freud explained the concept of God as an exalted father-image which he actually identified with the concept of leader-father,” and then remarked in a footnote: “Freud has in his ‘Group Psychology’ referred in the appendix to the hero problem raised by me, which is still the clearest personification, not only of the leader concept, but also of the individualistic God, and cannot be explained from the father psychology but rather from that of the rebellious son.”
It is an old story that the children of God created Him in their image. But what Rank did not admit was that the image they created and worshipped was a father-image.