Ola Raknes

Already at a very early age Ola Raknes was intensely occupied with religion. It was particularly the thought and the fear of Hell which these ruminations centered on. Sometime between the age of seven and eleven he began to wonder about what the saved people told, that by repenting they had begot, or been allowed to take part in, a new and better life, a life which the non-repented didn't know of and could not comprehend. He had a vague sense of them being right in some way, but at the same time he felt that they also were wrong. He had an opaque reminiscence of once having experienced this life, in his own words from the time he was about 3 or 4 years old, "when he was a church-builder". Later he considered this to have been a child's way of expressing that he had known another life before. From about the age of ten and several years onward he attempted to come in contact with this other life. He went to edifying meetings in the village, and he often attended church, although he, just like the saved people, figured that that in particular was less important because it was a lesser likelihood that a conversion would start there. It was a constant fear of ending in Hell which spurred him, because he was certain that was where he would go if he failed in finding his way to the new life.

Despite all his toils he never succeeded in attaining religious conversion. He felt that it would be dishonest of him if he stood up and testified the way some of his friends had done, that he had been graced, and he was also very ambivalent about believing whether all those who did so were totally honest. In hindsight Raknes found that partly what held him back was a fear of relinquishing.

During Christmas break, shortly before he turned 17, he stumbled across a booklet about determinism.[2] With the exception of some popularized scientific articles by G. H. Armauer Hansen, this was the first literary encounter he had which made him doubt the religious teachings which he had received until then. Even though he would later forget most of the content of the booklet, it made him consider the belief in eternal Hell without sense, and it also provided him with courage to trust his own thoughts and feelings a lot more than he had previously dared. When a little later he told his best friend, county school director Per Erdal, about his newly gained perspective on Hell, he was joyed to hear that his friend shared his view. The keen interest in religion would now lose its grip on Raknes for a number of years, and the interest in a life after death disappeared, never to return.^[A]

In the years both before and after he, as a twenty-year-old, got his examen artium, it was common practice among his comrades to make jokes about and with both religion, philosophy and psychology, which was deemed more or less as superstition or play with empty words. Raknes felt that such subjects were unfit for someone who had set out to do something useful with his life, which he had. When he began to study philology after secondary school, he was hoping that the goals and literature which he would study were going to show him a field where he felt that he had a particular calling. However, as absorbing as many subjects seemed at first, none offered to him the labor which would consume him fully. And he felt likewise when it came to the women: He met many whom he liked and also many which, in retrospect, he believed also were fond of him, but during this time it felt like no woman could ever love him – even though that was what he longed for more than anything else.

He was twenty-four and a half years old when he experienced his first big love affair since childhood,^[B] an event which he experienced as both a revelation and a revolution. Up until this time he had felt as if life only moved ahead in front of him, he being merely a passive spectator. From now on he felt that he lived and that he was himself a part of life, even though he still hadn't found his particular slot work-wise. Ola Raknes and Aslaug Vaa met in the Studentmållaget i Oslo. They also were colleagues as journalists for the newspaper Den 17de Mai ("May the 17th" a now defunct Nynorsk newspaper, at that time one of the nation's most subscribed to. The name is a reference to the date of the Norwegian Constitution Day). It was the interest for intellectual activities which brought them together, believed Aslaug's sister-in-law Thora Vaa (married to Aslaug's brother Dyre Vaa)(Fyllingsnes, page 11). The next years would be focused on more hands-on work: the philology studies, money that had to be earned, as well as an unceasingly growing family. The first daughter, Magli, was born in Oslo the year after Ola and Aslaug married. The family was constantly moving about the first years, and the second daughter, Anne, was born at the Vaa family farm in Kviteseid in Vest-Telemark. In between they had been living in Paris where Ola and also Aslaug were enrolled as students, and they also moved back to Paris in 1919. They lived in Rue Bonnard in a milieu of Norwegian artists, Henrik Sørensen and Dagfin Werenskiold being their closest neighbours, but hanging out with the artists was more to the liking of Aslaug. When Aslaug caught typhus and had to return home to Norway after two years in Paris, the two youngest of the then four children went with her while the two oldest, Magli and Anne remained in Paris together with Ola. After the stay in Paris the family lived for about a year in Kviteseid again. Then it moved to an apartment block in Johan Bruns gate at Adamstuen in Oslo which Ola Raknes had bought. There they lived for four years. Following that they moved to Lysaker (just outside Oslo's western city limits) where they remained until 1932–33. By then Ola had begun making enough money so that they once more could move back to Oslo (Fyllingsnes, p. 6).

As the 1930s went on, the marriage began to fall apart. Ola Raknes became more absorbed by psychoanalysis while Aslaug Vaa found her path in writing poetry. Her debut occurred as late as 1934. Their marriage ended on a bitter note in 1938, following years of separate living.[3]

About the time he turned thirty he got involved in a newspaper debate with the school man Jakob Naadland and bishop Peter Hognestad concerning reward for good deeds. The other two believed that man requires a promise of reward to be able to stay on the straight path. Ola Raknes, however, asserted, "that it is natural for man to love and be good, those are fundamental characteristics of man and needs no other 'payment' than to have the opportunity to function freely" (Raknes, 1959). Subsequent to this debate he started reading different books, mostly at random, about foreign religions, primitive as well as culture religions.

In the same year, 1917, Raknes commenced his four years as lector of Norwegian language and literature at Sorbonne in Paris, and he had planned his stay such that he would get the opportunity to study of his own heart a portion of the time. The first thing he wanted to study was the relationship between French and Norwegian literature in the Middle Ages. He started to read Joseph Bédier's great work about Les Légendes Épiques, a work which stunned him and convinced him that if he was ever going to understand the effects of Medieval French literature and its influences, he would also have to know something about Medieval philosophy and theology. Consequently, he contacted the university's professor of these subjects, François Picavet, studied several of his books, attended his lectures, and had several talks with him. Picavet possessed the enviable quality of making compendia when he had worked on a subject, where he summed up the development up through the present time. In this fashion Raknes started to read William James' book The Varieties of Religious Experience, the one book that would make the strongest impression on him above all others, and which later he would translate to Nynorsk. This was the first time that he had experienced that religion was dealt with as a natural phenomenon, and which in any case attempted to free itself from how the religions perceive themselves. He spent many weeks working his way through this book, and he walked about completely absorbed with new thoughts and feelings. Looking back, he writes that most of his friends looked upon him as if he were a loony, although a couple of artists appeared to envy him. On his last birthday, shortly before he died, Raknes described William James as the person who had had the greatest significance in his life (Dannevig). The revelation brought on him by this book was what he had been waiting for and which would show him a field of work to which he could apply himself wholly, one which in any case had importance to him, and maybe also to a lot of others.

Raknes now experienced that he could understand the religions from the "inside", even though he himself didn't believe in any dogmatic religion. This would have to be his task, he felt; to point out what really was true and valuable in religions and at the same time how there had entered into each single religion so much that was not true, but quite the contrary, inimical to life. His yearning to obtain further information grew strong. He needed concrete knowledge, both about the various religions, about philosophies of religion, about ethnology which provides backdrop and fertile ground for the different religions, and about life in all its appearances. He started to read as much as he could in all of these fields, partly at random, and at the university he attended lectures, classes, and seminars in general psychology and psychology of religion. psychopathology and psychiatry, and in biology. Raknes read the basics of the French school of sociology, works by among others Durkheim, Mauss, and Lévy-Bruhl, and he read numerous books about mysticism. His favourite was Les grands mystiques by Henri Delacroix, who was his teacher. He also read the main works of the then fledgling psychology of religion which had its origin predominantly in America, and of ethnology he read among other things a series of books by Roman Catholic missionaries

Raknes continued these studies when, after Sorbonne, he started in a position as Norwegian lector at University College in London where he stayed between 1921 and 1922.

What Raknes intended in this manner was for him to be able to explain and demonstrate his strong conviction, which he knew he was yet unable to prove. "I wanted to be able to explain and demonstrate my own conviction, which already from the outset I perceived to be true, even though I was aware that I wasn't able to prove it. The conviction was that the source of all true religion is an inner experiencing of life and growth and contact with something outside of one's own narrow self. In its narrowest form, you can have this experience localized in a wound healing, in its widest form, it is a sensation of communion with the entire universe. At first I meant to call this experience 'growth consciousness'." (Raknes, 1959)

After three years abroad, Raknes's finances were at a low point, and all time had to be directed toward financially profitable work. He taught languages and literature in high schools and wrote his English-Norwegian dictionary. It was not until 1927, after he had turned 40, that he was able to complete the book he had begun contemplating when he was in Paris, and begun working on in London. The book was Møtet med det heilage ("Encounter with the Holy"), and the next year he received his doctorate based upon it.

In the later years of his life Raknes explained: "I count myself a religious man, but I am an opponent of all dogmatic religion. The core of all religion is a certain experience both of oneself as a unit and of the unity between oneself and the universe." (Raknes, 1959)

Ola Raknes was always searching for improvements of the therapeutic technique, and he was also dissatisfied with the traditional psychoanalytical explanatory models for man's basic drives, instincts, and aggression, and he was skeptical of the psychological dualism of Freud's theories of these contradictory basic drives, which at first moved between the instinct for self preservation and sexuality, and later between the life instinct (Eros) and the death instinct (Thanatos). It was during his stay in Berlin that Ola Raknes heard Wilhelm Reich's name for the first time, but there would still be some years before he read anything by Reich. He was still busy studying Freud and other "orthodox" psychoanalysts. It was after Reich had published his book Charakteranalyse in 1933 that Ola Raknes in earnest began moving toward Reich's teachings. Following that book Raknes absorbed himself in Die Funktion des Orgasmus, then in Reich's articles in various psychoanalytical journals, and finally in Reich's own Zeitschrift für politische Psychologie und Sexualökonomie. Ola Raknes found it all to be most interesting and rich in perspective, however, this did not cause him to change either his basic attitudes or his psychotherapeutical technique.

Ola Raknes met Wilhelm Reich for the first time at the Scandinavian psychoanalysts meeting in Oslo in the Easter of 1934. Raknes was very much impressed by this strong personality, and the succinctness of his presentations and with which he presented himself during discussions about core elements of the themes that he discussed, helped Raknes attain a clearer understanding of many things. Wilhelm Reich's starting point was the psychoanalytical theories of Freud, but as early as 1925, based on experiences gained through volunteer work at his counselling clinic in Vienna for people with sexual problems, he began developing his theory of sex economy, a work which would continue until 1938. Raknes' first choice would be to commence apprentice therapy with Reich immediately, however, he had no way of travelling to Sweden where Reich was working at that time. In any case, they met again in August that same year on the 13th psychoanalytical congress in Luzern. There Ola Raknes, together with the two other Norwegian participants, professor of psychology Harald Schjelderup and child psychiatrist Nic. Hoel (who would later change her name to Nic. Waal), vehemently protested the blackballing of Reich from the International Psychoanalytical Association (I.P.V.). The Norwegian contingent was later at the congress approved as a distinct group, and this meant they could admit Reich in their membership. Wilhelm Reich did not, however, accept the offer of becoming a member when he moved to Norway later in 1934. At that time Raknes had already started in apprentice therapy with Otto Fenichel, whom he counted as one of Reich's friends and co-workers. He had from the outset told Fenichel that he would have gone to Reich if Reich had been in Norway.

Shortly after Reich had arrived in Norway, he opened a seminar in character analysis. Raknes was admitted to this despite not having undergone any such analysis himself. He tried out the techniques that he learned on a couple of his patients, with fairly good results. In the fall of 1936 he asked if Wilhelm Reich would accept him for apprentice therapy, both because of personal problems and because he thought that Reich's therapeutic approach was far more efficient than the classical Freudian technique which he had applied so far. Reich was in doubt and felt that Ola Raknes was a bit old and too armored, but in the end he accepted. Ola Raknes was probably one of the first patients to whom Reich consistently applied his new technique, which he labeled characteranalytic vegetotherapy. Not surprisingly, due to Raknes' advanced age, the restructuring of his character, that is the apprentice therapy, was cumbersome and lasted for almost three years, three sessions a week. The response did not fail to appear. At times everything felt so destitute and hopeless that he doubted whether he would ever be able to do the work that he still believed he was created to do, in a way he himself would be content with – and if he couldn't manage that, there would be no reason to live even. But after a long period of time he finally began noticing that the energies started to make themselves felt; he started noticing what took place inside of his own organism, and what it would mean to be functioning freely. He was struck by the fundamental differences between characteranalytic vegetotherapy and traditional psychoanalysis. Even though he had read Reich's book on character analysis, and he had also applied the technique on his own patients, having the technique work on his own body was something altogether new. Compared to classical psychoanalysis, the technique was now extended to the interpretation of character expressions and bodily attitudes, and to working through somatical blockings through direct manipulation. (Raknes, 1959)

In his practice Raknes emphasized assisting people in working through to the living in themselves and work to release the innate propensity for development, the "free growth". The way of doing this was by removing the obstacles and blockages standing in the way, and this in turn would be effected when the person learned to acknowledge him- or herself, together with their thoughts, feelings and impulses. The most important part of this was to integrate body perception – to feel what one wanted, to yield to the urge if nothing of significance gainsayed it. In the article "Life and Religion"[4] Raknes pointed to Wilhelm Reich's definition of life as a continuous process consisting of rhythmical shifts between mechanical tension, bioenergetic charge, bioenergetic discharge, and mechanical relaxation. In it he wrote, "Most people are going to need a certain amount of practice in noticing their own bodily states before they can experience this life rhythm. But then they are clearly going to experience it, in particular in two guises: in the rhythmical flow that penetrates the entire body when it is able to freely go along with the breathing, and particularly intense in the state popularly called 'living together', that is in the sexual orgasm".

Even though Raknes conceded that the orgone theory of Wilhelm Reich – an expanding of Freud's libido concept to encompass a general life energy, which Reich called orgone – wasn't exhaustively proven with reference to the natural sciences' demands for proof, he felt that from his own observations and experiences it must have some merit. In the book Wilhelm Reich and orgonomy (written in English, but translated into many different languages), which he wrote a few years prior to his death, he explains in an educational and easy-to-comprehend manner the theory and its implications for various scientific disciplines, and in relation to society. How Reich was apparently able to make use of this energy in producing rain, using a so-called cloudbuster, a technical apparatus which is said to focus and project orgone energy, Raknes was himself a witness during a visit to Reich's estate "Orgonon" in Maine in 1953:

There had been a drought that had lasted for weeks, and the weather report predicted continued drought across the Eastern United States. Then Reich pointed the apparatus at a certain point in the sky and left it on for an hour and a half. If this is correctly set up, he said, we are going to experience rain within 8–9 hours. And quite correctly. After 8 hours we received an 8-hour streaming downpour across some tens of square kilometers surrounding the apparatus! An experience of that sort makes a certain impression. (Gabrielsen, 1962)

Six times after the war Raknes traveled to the US to visit Reich, and to keep his skills and knowledge up-to-date with respect to the development of Reich's theories and methods. Then, upon his return to Norway, he would replicate as much as he could of the observations and experiments that he had witnessed in Reich's laboratory, experiments which constituted the foundation for the discovery of the bions and the orgone energy in the body.

Raknes was of the opinion that what Reich had discovered was what others before him had described, but then using other names, such as animal magnetism, chi, and prana. Raknes also believed that such phenomena as telepathy and clairvoyance were real, and felt that the only thing that would cause scientists to deny their existence was narrow-mindedness and dogmatism (Gabrielsen, 1962). He believed that continued investigation and research into the orgone energy would possibly shed light on these phenomena.

Factors drawing Raknes toward the orgone theory were his lifelong curiosity and interest for the origin of religions, the religious experience and how it shapes man, and he felt it could contribute in shedding light upon these areas on a scientific basis. Furthermore, he felt that it constituted an expansion of therapeutic treatment, from being a limited psychotherapy to deserving to be called a biotherapy.

Ola Raknes had his treatment room in the basement of his home at Nordberg in Oslo, and there he also had his own "orgone closet" where his patients sat in order to be supplied life energy, a so-called orgone accumulator. He was sought after in many locations around the world, and as late as in his last year of living, albeit tired and marked by illness (Skard, 1975), he traveled to Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, England, and the United States, to visit friends, give lectures and receive patients in orgone therapy. He treated a total of 800 patients, and on his last working day he received five patients.

Ola Raknes' work as a psychotherapist is being continued by several psychologists in Norway and also branched to other countries, in particular through Gerda Boyesen and David Boadella, both students of Raknes, who later established institutions for education of therapists in London and Switzerland, respectively.

In 1972, at the age of 85, he initiated the founding of the "Forum for karakteranalytisk vegetoterapi" (this was also the name of a journal which was established in 1992) to assist in recruiting new vegetotherapists (being then at a low point).

Raknes organized study circles and was also involved in Reich's journal projects Zeitschrift für Politische Psychologie und Sexualökonomie (published 1934–1938)[5] and Tidsskrift for seksualøkonomi (Norw. "Journal for sex economy", one issue only published in 1939) which he was editing together with Odd Havrevold.

After Wilhelm Reich had left Norway for the United States in 1939, few people associated with the community of Norwegian psychoanalysts where longer willing to defend his teachings. Even the American Reich supporters were according to Raknes "disappointingly orthodox" (Dannevig, 1975). The only people left to carry on Reich's work appeared to be Ola Raknes and Nic. Waal, and following the death of Waal in 1960, Raknes was sometimes condescendingly referred to as "Reich's last disciple". Nevertheless, several psychiatrists had confidence in him, and his matter-of-fact style and all-over good reputation as a therapist saw to it that the demand from would-be patients never relented, in particular from abroad. And for the last 10–15 years of his life Ola Raknes was met with unanimous professional acceptance and veneration. (Skard, 1975; Kile, 1989). One among many, actor Sean Connery came to Oslo in 1967 to receive treatments by Ola Raknes (Haga, 2002), something which, for the first and only time, made the popular media give attention to his work, as they created a commotion outside his practice (Kile, 1989).

Ola Raknes was a strong proponent of providing freedom to the child so that it could make its own experiences instead of being told by adults how to perceive things: "Children always pick their own ideals. As soon as we put up ideals for them, they will start cheating on themselves. They are the ones who should make the choice." (Gabrielsen, 1962) In one of the essays in the book Fri Vokster ("Free growth") Raknes elaborates on how he as a psychologist sees the child's developmental dynamics being critically dependent on being given the opportunity to learn for itself to regulate such matters as going to the bathroom, what and when to eat and when and how much it wants to sleep, through experiencing and through practicing to master, without the adults spurring the child on.

Such moral rules as not to inflict harm on others or to abstain from stealing, Raknes believed children had to find out about on their own, not through admonitions or prohibitions from the parents: "I believe that when a child lies, it is because it has been punished for telling the truth. And when it steals, it is because it feels neglected in one way or another. [...children] steal the love that isn't given to them." With respect to war Raknes meant for instance that it would be fine if the parents explained why people make wars against each other and to what this can lead, but they ought to leave it to the child to figure out what to make of it all. (Gabrielsen, 1962)

Although Raknes mostly treated adult patients (Dannevig, 1975), it was the child that Ola Raknes focused on so strongly in his educational efforts to promote values and also as a therapist. The child is the center of focus in the article "Life and Religion", in the book Fri Vokster, in his therapy and in himself the way he was – the child in the adult and the child in itself, in center and teeming with life, the child which is devoid of sentimentality and childishness. His friend and student, Rolf Grønseth said of him that Ola Raknes manifested this child himself in his eagerness and his joy in searching and in pride in himself the way it can be seen in children, but that has been lost in most all adults – but that he combined this with an unusual degree of sober attitude. He saw things simply and straightforwardly and gave them names that all could understand. He could easily be misjudged as being naïve, but in reality he held a broad view. (Grønseth, 1975) Similarly was his repulsion great when it came to use of force and repression of others (Dannevig, 1975).

Ola Raknes once said to his friend and student Rolf Grønseth: "I too must be allowed to die at some time". He died pursuant to a brief bout of pneumonia at the end of January 1975, only a few days after his 88th birthday.

Einar Dannevig sums up his experience of Ola Raknes as a man of spirit: "The clarity of thought and emotion, conveyed through many languages, the ability to simplify with a taste for the big and significant parts of it all together with a genuine modesty and complete absence of ambitions for power made it a distinctive and a big experience to meet Ola Raknes, preferably in person, but also in writing." (Dannevig, 1975)