The Ethical and the Empathic in the Thinking of Otto Rank

In contemplating the psychology of the individual it is possible to focus on intra-psychic mechanisms, dynamisms, and structure, as did Freud, or to adopt an interpersonal perspective and to view human thought, emotion, and behavior in the light of interactions between people, as did Rank. The two approaches are certainly not mutually exclusive; in fact they complement each other and each yields its own measure of truth about the human condition. At a time when infant research in the psychological field was unknown, Rank had an intuitive sense about the nature of the bond between mother and child. He sensed the depth of the attachment and the pain of separation. He understood the striving of each individual in the course of growth and development to become autonomous, and he recognized that the price for this delineation of self was a certain amount of guilt. Rank referred to the nature of human relatedness, beginning with the mother-child relationship, as ethical. He did not mean moral; he meant related. He had no specific content in mind; no code of morals or super-ego directives were part of his concept. However, although Rank did not explicitly speak of empathy in connection with his concept of ethical relatedness, the very word “related” inevitably implies an identification with the person to whom one relates. Thus, in the interaction with another individual the ethical and the empathic come together.

The origin of the ethical attitude resides in the mother-child relationship and the potential for empathic feeling and understanding of one for the other comes from the fact that at one time they were one organism. The gradual separation of the “I” from the “Thou” initially through birth leaves a residue of feeling for “the other” as if he or she