The Concept of Will in the Thinking of Otto Rank and its Consequences for Clinical Practice

Recently I listened to a television interview with Roger Rosenblatt who had written a report for Time magazine on children of war, later published as a book (1983). He was interested in the psychological effects on children of growing up in a situation of continuous warfare with its cruelties, horrors, deprivations, and constant dangers. To this end he had talked with children who had known nothing but war from various parts of the world from Northern Ireland to Israel, from Thailand to Vietnam. His findings are remarkable; for while the study is not statistically “scientific,” its results point to a sufficient uniformity —a pattern quite different from that which our theories would lead us to expect. These results give us pause and make us question some of our premises about child development. We have been accustomed to thinking causally —to conclude, for example, that if a child has experienced cruelty he will either react by identifying with the aggressor or retreat in masochistic submission. Such was not necessarily the case. Many, if not most of the children who had grown up surrounded by death and horror, who had seen their parents die, who had known devastation, hunger, and aloneness, retained a remarkable degree of empathic feeling, of standards of ethical behavior, of love of life and, surprisingly, of aesthetic appreciation.

It would not be fruitful for me to speculate at this point about the meaning of these findings. I cite the example to bring to our awareness the extent to which we are immured in our theories and the degree to which these theories are colored by a deterministic point of view about life and human personality. The scientific ethos of several centuries has left its mark on us. In explaining phenomena we are accustomed to looking for causality in the past and, in these terms, to predicting the future. Certainly this method is by no means all negative,