69 Facts About Ola Raknes

Ola Raknes was a Norwegian psychologist, philologist and non-fiction writer.

Ola Raknes has been described as someone who spent his entire life working with the conveying of ideas through many languages and between different epistemological systems of reference, science and religion.

Ola Raknes has been credited for his contributions to strengthening and enriching the Nynorsk language and its use in the public sphere.

Ola Raknes was married twice: in his first marriage in 1911 with Aslaug Vaa they begot the children Magli, Anne, Tora, Erik and Tor.

Ola Raknes attended folkeskole on the neighbouring farm and then worked for a while on the family's farm prior to enrolling at middelskole in Volda.

Ola Raknes took his examen artium as private candidate at Kristiania katedralskole in 1907.

Ola Raknes took on miscellaneous teaching positions in the years between 1910 and 1914 and worked as a journalist from 1914 to 1916 in the newspaper Den 17de Mai while at the same time continuing his studies.

Ola Raknes continued these studies when, after Sorbonne, he began as lector in Norwegian at University College in London where he stayed from 1921 to 1922.

Ola Raknes studied psychoanalysis at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute from 1928 to 1929 and later at the Orgone Institute in New York City in 1946.

Ola Raknes published some popularized essays on psychology which he collected in the book Fri vokster which was published in 1949.

Ola Raknes provided the momentum behind book publications as well as sales, and he brought the accounting into order, since it hadn't been attended to for the last three years.

Ola Raknes joined the Studentmallaget i Oslo which was founded in 1900, and he attained a central position, among other things he was elected chairman in 1913 but had to renounce the position.

Ola Raknes was an appreciated literary translator, both of scholarly as well as artistic prose.

Ola Raknes was the philological supervisor of Henrik Rytter's ten-volume translation of Shakespeare.

Sigmund Skard writes of the two dictionaries which Ola Raknes wrote, that far from being mere glossaries, they were very personal works which again reflected the quest of Ola Raknes for his identity.

Ola Raknes' dictionaries were reputedly so meticulous that even the most abject taboo words were included, and they became important tools in the cultural struggle of the Nynorsk movement.

Ola Raknes translated several works of fiction as well as non-fiction into Nynorsk.

Ola Raknes did a groundbreaking job in establishing a philological and psychological terminology for the language.

Already at a very early age Ola Raknes was intensely occupied with religion.

Ola Raknes had a vague sense of them being right in some way, but at the same time he felt that they were wrong.

Ola Raknes 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".

Ola Raknes 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.

Ola Raknes 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 very ambivalent about believing whether all those who did so were totally honest.

In hindsight Ola Raknes found that partly what held him back was a fear of relinquishing.

Ola Raknes felt that such subjects were unfit for someone who had set out to do something useful with his life, which he had.

Ola Raknes was twenty-four and a half years old when he experienced his first big love affair since childhood, an event which he experienced as both a revelation and a revolution.

Ola Raknes 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".

Ola Raknes started to read Joseph Bedier's great work about Les Legendes Epiques, 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 have to know something about Medieval philosophy and theology.

Ola Raknes spent many weeks working his way through this book, and he walked about completely absorbed with new thoughts and feelings.

On his last birthday, shortly before he died, Ola Raknes described William James as the person who had had the greatest significance in his life.

Ola Raknes now experienced that he could understand the religions from the "inside", even though he himself didn't believe in any dogmatic religion.

Ola Raknes 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.

Ola Raknes 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.

Ola Raknes read the basics of the French school of sociology, works by among others Durkheim, Mauss, and Levy-Bruhl, and he read numerous books about mysticism.

Ola Raknes's favourite was Les grands mystiques by Henri Delacroix, who was his teacher.

Ola Raknes 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.

Ola 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.

Ola Raknes taught languages and literature in high schools and wrote his English-Norwegian dictionary.

From his work with the psychology of religion, Ola Raknes had come to the conclusion that he needed some method for investigating the subconscious if he was to go further in understanding human behaviour.

In 1928, for that reason, Ola Raknes finished up his school work and moved to Berlin and began studying at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute with a grant from the Nansen fund.

Ola Raknes experienced progression in his new field of activity, and despite strong opposition from large parts of the medical profession, he was in the process of making a name for himself.

Ola Raknes was still busy studying Freud and other "orthodox" psychoanalysts.

Ola Raknes met Wilhelm Reich for the first time at the Scandinavian psychoanalysts meeting in Oslo in the Easter of 1934.

Ola 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 Ola Raknes attain a clearer understanding of many things.

At that time Ola Raknes had already started in apprentice therapy with Otto Fenichel, whom he counted as one of Reich's friends and co-workers.

Ola Raknes had from the outset told Fenichel that he would have gone to Reich if Reich had been in Norway.

Ola Raknes was admitted to this despite not having undergone any such analysis himself.

Ola Raknes tried out the techniques that he learned on a couple of his patients, with fairly good results.

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.

Ola Raknes was struck by the fundamental differences between characteranalytic vegetotherapy and traditional psychoanalysis.

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, Ola Raknes was himself a witness during a visit to Reich's estate "Orgonon" in Maine in 1953:.

Six times after the war Ola 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.

Ola 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.

Ola Raknes 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.

Ola Raknes believed that continued investigation and research into the orgone energy would possibly shed light on these phenomena.

Ola Raknes had his treatment room in the basement of his home at Nordberg in Oslo, and there he had his own "orgone closet" where his patients sat in order to be supplied life energy, a so-called orgone accumulator.

Ola Raknes 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, he traveled to Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, England, and the United States, to visit friends, give lectures and receive patients in orgone therapy.

Ola Raknes treated a total of 800 patients, and on his last working day he received five patients.

Ola Raknes was not someone merely parroting his great teacher.

Waal, and following the death of Waal in 1960, Ola Raknes was sometimes condescendingly referred to as "Reich's last disciple".

Ola Raknes is easily perceived as a loyal and grateful student of the great master even where he expressed opinions of his own which were hard fought for and well tested, Not until after he had turned 80, he wrote in the preface of his book Wilhelm Reich and Orgonomy: 'Some developments of Reich's ideas are due to myself and I am unable to tell, in some cases, which ideas were first mentioned by me, and which ones by Reich'.

Ola Raknes was a member of Norwegian Democratic Group and he joined the circle of people centering on Orientering in 1953.

Ola Raknes was a member of the Socialist People's Party from that year, and that party's successor, the Socialist Left Party.

Ola Raknes felt that the way society was organized created dependent individuals.

Ola Raknes thus placed the focus on the connection between current character traits in Norwegian society, such as feelings of either superiority or inferiority, competitiveness and self-effacing dutifullness, and characteristic structural traits in society itself such as concentration of power and bureaucratic control, in which the former provides fertile ground for the latter.

Out of all that he wrote, it was the article from 1953 whose title in English was "The Orgonomic Concept of Health and its Social Consequences" that Ola Raknes himself valued most highly.

Ola Raknes saw things simply and straightforwardly and gave them names that all could understand.

Ola Raknes died pursuant to a brief bout of pneumonia at the end of January 1975, only a few days after his 88th birthday.