section_path: Philosophical views/Psychology
section_name: Psychology
paragraph_text: Psychology
  
  Soul belief prominently figures in Otto Rank 's work recovering the importance of immortality in the psychology of primitive, classical and modern interest in life and death. Rank's work directly opposed the scientific psychology that concedes the possibility of the soul's existence and postulates it as an object of research without really admitting that it exists. He says: "Just as religion represents a psychological commentary on the social evolution of man, various psychologies represent our current attitudes toward spiritual belief. In the animistic era, psychologizing was a creating of the soul; in the religious era, it was a representing of the soul to one's self; in our era of natural science it is a knowing of the individual soul." Rank's "Seelenglaube" translates to "Soul Belief". Rank's work had a significant influence on Ernest Becker 's understanding of a universal interest in immortality. In The Denial of Death, Becker describes "soul" in terms of Søren Kierkegaard use of "self" when he says that "what we call schizophrenia is an attempt by the symbolic self to deny the limitations of the finite body."
  
  † Kierkegaard's use of "self" may be a bit confusing. He uses it to include the symbolic self and the physical body. It is a synonym really for "total personality" that goes beyond the person to include what we would now call the "soul" or the "ground of being" out of which the created person sprang.