Editing Otto Rank (section)

== Influence ==
[[Rollo May]], a pioneer of [[existential psychotherapy]] in the United States, was deeply influenced by Rank's post-Freudian lectures and writings and always considered Rank to be the most important precursor of existential therapy. Shortly before his death, Rollo May wrote the foreword to Robert Kramer's edited collection of Rank's American lectures. "I have long considered Otto Rank to be the great unacknowledged genius in Freud's circle," said May (Rank, 1996, p. xi).

In 1924, [[Jessie Taft]], an early feminist philosopher, social worker, and student of [[George H. Mead]], met Otto Rank. After becoming his patient, she was inspired to develop "relationship therapy" and eventually, the "functional model of social work" at the Pennsylvania School of Social Work, both explicitly based on Rank's ideas. Taft (1958) wrote the first biography of Rank and had a profound understanding of his thinking on how the creative will emerges from the empathic relationship between client and social worker.

In addition, it was Jessie Taft and Frederick Allen's work at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic that introduced [[Carl Rogers]], then a psychologist in the Child Study Department of the Rochester Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Children, to "relationship therapy" as the practical application of Rank's ideas.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Kirschenbaum|first1=Howard|title=On Becoming Carl Rogers|year=1979|publisher=Delacorte Press|isbn=0-440-06707-3|pages=92–93}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last1=deCarvalho|first1=Roy J.|title=Otto Rank, the Rankian Circle in Philadelphia, and the Origins of Carl Rogers' Person-Centered Psychotherapy|journal=History of Psychology|date=1999|volume=2|issue=2|pages=132–148|doi=10.1037/1093-4510.2.2.132|pmid=11623737}}</ref>

In 1936 [[Carl Rogers]], influenced by social workers on his staff trained at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, invited Otto Rank to give a series of lectures in New York on Rank's post-Freudian models of experiential and relational therapy. Rogers was transformed by these lectures and always credited Rank with having profoundly shaped [[person-centered psychotherapy|"client-centered" therapy]] and the entire profession of counseling. 

The New York writer [[Paul Goodman (writer)|Paul Goodman]], who was co-founder with [[Fritz Perls]] of the [[Gestalt therapy|Gestalt]] method of psychotherapy that makes Otto Rank's "here-and-now" central to its approach, described Rank's post-Freudian ideas on art and creativity as "beyond praise" in ''Gestalt Therapy'' (Perls, Goodman and Hefferline, 1951, p.&nbsp;395). Erving Polster, another well-known Gestalt therapist, was also strongly influenced by Rank's practice of focusing on the "here-and-now": "Rank brought the human relationship directly into his office. He influenced analysts to take seriously the actual present interaction between therapist and patient, rather than maintain the fixed, distant, 'as though' relationship that had given previous analysts an emotional buffer for examining the intensities of therapeutic sensation and wish. Rank's contributions opened the way for ''encounter'' to become accepted as a deep therapeutic agent" (Polster, 1968, p.&nbsp;6).

Rank also affected the practice of action-oriented and reflective therapies such as dramatic role-playing and psychodrama. "Although there is no evidence of a direct influence, Rank's ideas found new life in the work of such action psychotherapists as Moreno, who developed a psychodrama technique of doubling ... and Landy [director of the drama therapy program at New York University], who attempted to conceptualize balance as an integration of role and counterrole" (Landy, 2008, p.&nbsp;29).