Ola Raknes (17 January 1887 – 28 January 1975) was a Norwegian psychologist, philologist and non-fiction writer. Born in Bergen, Norway, he was internationally known as a psychoanalyst in the Reichian tradition. He 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 (Dannevig, 1975). For large portions of his life he was actively contributing to the public discourse in Norway. He has also been credited for his contributions to strengthening and enriching the Nynorsk language and its use in the public sphere.
Raknes was known as a thorough philologist and a controversial therapist. Internationally he was known as one of Wilhelm Reich's closest students and defenders.
Ola Raknes was the son of the farmer Erik Askildson (Askjellson) Raknes (1856–1926) and Magdali Olsdotter (born Raknes) (1859–96) and grew up at the family farm of Raknes in Hamre Municipality on the island Osterøy in the Osterfjorden fjord near Bergen in a strict pietist environment. There were altogether 10 children of whom 7 grew up to become adults, and five of his siblings emigrated to the United States. He was married twice: in his first marriage in 1911 with Aslaug Vaa (1889 – 1965, the marriage was dissolved in 1938) they begot the children Magli (1912–1993), Anne (1914–2001), Tora (1916–1995), Erik (1919–) and Tor (1923–). The second marriage in 1941 with Gjertrud Bonde (1913–1975) gave him the daughter Ada (born 1952).
Ola Raknes attended folkeskole (primary school) on the neighbouring farm and then worked for a while on the family's farm prior to enrolling at middelskole (the next higher level in the education system of that time) in f. After that he graduated from the Hambros skole in Bergen in 1904. He took his examen artium as private candidate at Kristiania katedralskole in 1907. During the winter of 1907–08 he joined the elephant seal-catching vessel Solglimt to the Crozet islands in the southern Indian Ocean to collect plants and animals for the university in Kristiania. A liverwort, Jamesoniella raknesii was named after him. During the summers between 1910 and 1916 he served his military draft duty.
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 ("the 17th of May") while at the same time continuing his studies. In addition he worked during this period as a hotel worker. In 1915 he took his cand. philol. linguistical-historical "embedseksamen" (a public exam required for most professional positions in the public sphere) with Norwegian language as major subject and English and French as minor subjects. His major thesis was about Egill Skallagrímsson. In 1916 he was headmaster at Larvik higher school for one year. In 1917 he got a position as lector in Norwegian language and Norwegian literature at Sorbonne in Paris, and he spent the four years here earnestly by studying general psychology, psychology of religion, biology, sosiology, and furthermore medieval literature, medieval philosophy and theology on the side of his teaching position. He 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' working capacity was widely spoken of, and during a period he worked both as secretary for Det Norske Samlaget, while at the same time working on the dictionary and preparing his doctoral thesis in psychology of religion, Møtet med det heilage ("Encounter with the Holy"), which was published in 1927. The dissertation which was also published as a book (and republished again in the 1970s), investigates the phenomenon of religious ecstasy in view of what was then recent findings and theories in the fields of ethnology, but particularly in psychology and psychoanalysis. In 1924 he went on to finish studies in pedagogy. Apart from this he also worked as a literary translator. Raknes studied psychoanalysis at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute from 1928 to 1929 and later at the Orgone Institute in New York City in 1946. From 1929 on he had a private practice as psychoanalyst. He published some popularized essays on psychology which he collected in the book Fri vokster which was published in 1949. This was the first book which introduced Wilhelm Reich's theories and therapeutical practice to a Norwegian audience (Dannevig, 1975).
In May 1908 Ola Raknes, then still a student, became manager and handyman for Norskt Maalkontor (literally "Norwegian language office"), an office dedicated to promoting the still young Nynorsk language. In this job which he had until 1910 he dealt with book sales and administrative chores for Det Norske Samlaget. He 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. Being the first secretary of the Samlaget he made a significant contribution to the establishing of its first real administration in a time period when publishing in Nynorsk was starting to become self-sufficient (Skard, 1975). Ola Raknes joined the Studentmållaget i Oslo (A pro-Nynorsk organization among students in 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. In later times he would serve as an often used speaker both in the 20s and 30s. Already as a student Ola Raknes published French-Norwegian Wordlist. Having returned from London he began working on English-Norwegian Dictionary, which was produced between 1922 and 1927. This as well as French-Norwegian Dictionary, which was written between 1939 and 1942, were both written for the "school book committee" within the Samlaget, where Raknes was a board member between 1915 and 1917.
Ola Raknes loved poetry, and together with I. C. Grøndahl he published the first Norwegian literature history volume in English in 1923. He was an appreciated literary translator, both of scholarly as well as artistic prose. He was the philological supervisor of Henrik Rytter's ten-volume translation of Shakespeare. Sigmund Skard writes of the two dictionaries which Ola Raknes wrote (Skard, 1975), that far from being mere glossaries, they were very personal works which again reflected the quest of Ola Raknes for his identity. Skard compares this work with that of Ivar Aasen more than 50 years earlier. Aasen had made his way through the entire tributary of Norwegian folk speech and compared it with another Nordic language: Danish. Skard writes that Raknes, "with strong power of empathy, integrated the values of two of the largest and oldest European cultural languages, procured everything that they possessed, from past to present, and confronted that with his own linguistic heritage and his personal linguistic sense. To check himself he drew in the living present-day speech in one of the richest East Norwegian rural dialects, in collaboration with his first wife, the poet Aslaug Vaa, as well as her father, the farmer Tor Vaa. Long into the future will these books be the daily benefit to everyone who works with the Norwegian language."
Both the school book committee and to some extent the popular writings committee of which he was also a member from 1911, acted as schools in publishing where the students had to deal with all aspects of book publishing: market evaluations, editorial reviews, recruitment of authors, practical editorial chores, deals with publishing houses or printers, distribution, marketing and economy. 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. From 1922 to 1930 he again worked for the Samlaget, this time as secretary to the board, however, in reality he was director of the publishing house. Raknes also translated several works of fiction as well as non-fiction into Nynorsk. He did a groundbreaking job in establishing a philological and psychological terminology for the language.(Dannevig, 1975) Raknes was deeply involved in the Nynorsk movement, which included the Høgnorsk movement, and he was a founding member of Norsk Måldyrkingslag ("Norwegian society for language cultivation") in 1928.