Dr. Rainer Maria Kohler is a Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice in Auburndale, Massachusetts, where he has offered analytical psychotherapy since 1991. His path to depth psychology followed a prior career in corporate law; while working at a prominent Boston firm, a transformative encounter with Jungian psychotherapy redirected his vocation toward the healing arts. He subsequently undertook several years of analytic training at the C. G. Jung Institute of New England, earning his Diploma in Analytical (Jungian) Psychology.
Kohler holds degrees from Georgetown University and Boston College Law School, as well as a law degree from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt, and is a licensed psychoanalyst in the state of New York. He is a member of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP) and the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP). His clinical orientation is grounded in classical Jungian psychotherapy, with particular emphasis on dream analysis, symbolic interpretation, and the depth-psychological exploration of the unconscious.
His therapeutic focus addresses stress management, anxiety, depression, trauma, relationship difficulties, midlife transitions, and existential questions of meaning and purpose. Kohler is a proponent of sustained analytic work, arguing that meaningful personality restructuring requires extended engagement with the depth-psychological process. He is fluent in both English and German, and his published scholarly work includes an exploration of prenatal development and its implications for psychological growth through the lens of current neuroscientific research. He has maintained his practice for over three decades.
Training & lineage
- JD Boston College Law School
- JD Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt
- BA Georgetown University
- Diploma in Analytical (Jungian) Psychology C.G. Jung Institute of New England
Specialties
Dr. Rainer Maria Kohler, a Licensed Jungian Psychoanalyst trained at the C.G. Jung Institute of New England, came to his vocation by a route that feels, in retrospect, almost mythically arranged. Graduating from the Gymnasium in Germany in 1957 with an idealist's desire to help people, he found no clear path into the therapeutic professions and spent the next twenty-one years as a lawyer — practicing and teaching with American law firms and law schools — while the original dream, as he might say, went underground. It surfaced during a sabbatical, in the office of a Jungian analyst, when a dream he had brought to that very first session turned out to carry a precise and urgent message about his own life. Soon -- "like a bolt from heaven" -- this recognition arrived: What his analyst was doing was the answer to a hope he had carried for two decades.
What distinguished that early experience — and what shapes how Kohler works now — was the way the dream was not just an event during the night but functioned as an important message. In his work he listens to each client on two frequencies simultaneously, following the conscious story while also attending to its symbolic undertow. He does not require dream recall, and he does not impose his interpretation; instead, he holds the symbolic layer in readiness, introducing material from mythology, religion, fairy tales, and anthropology at moments he judges fitting. The comparative library he draws on is genuinely his own — rooted in a German childhood, deepened by forty years of training and clinical encounter — something closer, as he put it, to a second mother tongue than a database. The hour, he tells clients early and often, belongs entirely to them.
Kohler works with men and women across a wide range of ages and orientations — he has seen clients from twenty-one to eighty-seven — and he is candid that some relationships are harder than others, viewing the more challenging ones as summons to his own continued growth. Many who seek him out arrive already curious about Jung or the life of dreams; some report a dream from the night before their very first appointment, the psyche, as he sees it, already moving toward something before the ego has quite decided. What a new client will find, beneath all the theory and the forty years of practice, is someone who describes his care for the people with whom he works in unguarded terms: he tends, he says, to fall in love with his clients, and considers it his privilege to help them to become who they are meant to be.