Otto Rank’s will therapy helped shape the ideas and techniques of relationship therapy developed by the Philadelphia social workers Jessie Taft, Virginia Robinson, and Frederick Allen in the 1930s. Rank’s work and these ideas and techniques in turn strongly influenced the formulation of Carl Rogers’ person-centered psychotherapy. This article compares and contrasts will, relationship, and person-centered approaches to psychotherapy and discusses the social factors—primarily the professional conflicts between a male-dominated psychiatry and female social workers over the independent practice of psychotherapy—that were crucial in the dissemination of Rank’s psychological thought and the early popularity of Rogers.

The contribution of Carl R. Rogers (1902–1987) to the field of psychotherapy—the Rogerian, or “person-centered” approach—and the humanistic psychology he helped to establish in the late 1950s and 1960s constitute a well-documented chapter in the history of American psychology (deCarvalho, 1989, 1990, 1991a, 1991b, 1992).

Some have interpreted Rogers’ “non-directive,” “client-centered,” or “person-centered” approach to psychotherapy as an expression of the essential early influence of Protestant thought, namely that of John Dewey and William Kilpatrick (Sollod, 1978). Others have pointed to the similarities between Rogers’ humanistic psychology and the thought of Otto Rank (Kramer, 1995; Sollod, 1978), Jan Christian Smuts and Alfred Adler (Ansbacher, 1978), Carl Jung (Barefield, 1968; Smith, 1970), Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (Chacko, 1973), and J. L. Moreno (Corsini, 1956; Shearon, 1981), or have argued that Rogers’ view was a synthesis of the self theories of Snygg, Combs, Goldstein, Maslow, Angyal, Sullivan, Raimy, and Lecky (Sollod, 1978).

These accounts are problematic because they are primarily philosophical, with little or no reference to chronology or history. In contrast, in this article I expand on Kramer’s (1995) argument that in his earliest formulation of the person-centered approach, Rogers was under the influence of the neo-psychoanalyst Otto Rank. The influence of Rank’s theory of will therapy can be seen in Rogers’ emphasis on the here and now of the therapeutic relationship itself, his conviction that nurturing and intuitive emotional bonding can produce individual growth,...