Otto Rank and the New story of Science*

I would not be surprised if you were puzzled by my strange title. What is a “story of science,” new or old? Actually this esoteric use of the word “story” comes from a book entitled The New Story of Science . It is written by Robert Angros, a philosopher, and George Stanciu, a theoretical physicist. The book attempts—and I feel quite successfully—to delineate a new orientation in the scientific world as it pursues the story of the nature of reality in all fields of endeavor. The word “story” refers to a “cosmic world view of a civilization, the universal framework in which all else is understood and evaluated” ( p. v). It is the philosophical, intellectual perspective which dominates the way in which all phenomena are to be understood.

Let me make this clearer by contrasting two world views: the old story and the new. For three centuries, since the discoveries of Isaac Newton, the influence of the physical sciences was paramount in creating the predominant world view, which was materialistic. Matter was the only reality and space and time were absolute. This view applied not only to the hard sciences, but to the study of man as well. From this viewpoint, in which it was thought all phenomena could be reducible to the primacy of their atomic structure, and in which function was deterministically dependent on this structure, the idea that the human creature could function in the name of free choice was thought to be an illusion, since matter, which is the only or at least the primary reality, cannot act freely.

We are so accustomed to thinking in causal, mechanistic terms that we are scarcely aware that this is a particular framework and we take for granted that it is the only rational way to approach an