Otto Rank Books

Sigmund Freud’s relationship with Otto Rank was the most significant of his professional life, with Freud regarding Rank as his most brilliant disciple. Their collaboration spanned psychoanalytic writing, practice, and politics; Rank served as the managing director of Freud’s publishing house and contributed two chapters to Freud's seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, marking the only instance of another name on its title page. This collection of 250 letters, compiled by E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer, illuminates their twenty-year partnership and the eventual painful split. The correspondence, spanning from 1906 to 1925, reveals not only their professional insights but also their personal lives, including friendships, rivals, families, and travels. Notably, the letters document Rank’s growing independence, the father-son schism over his "anti-Oedipal" views, and their surprising reconciliation before their final separation. This candid correspondence offers a glimpse into how the pioneers of modern psychotherapy interacted with patients, colleagues, and each other, illustrating the development of psychoanalysis alongside early twentieth-century science, art, philosophy, and politics. This rich primary source serves as a powerful narrative of early psychoanalysis and its two most influential figures.

"[Rank's thought] has implications for the deepest and broadest development of the social sciences . . . and of all [Rank's] books, Art and Artist is the most secure monument to his genius." --Ernest Becker

2010 Reprint of 1952 Edition. First published in 1924, Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth took as its starting point a note that Freud added to his The Interpretation of Dreams: "Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety." Rank set out to identify "the ultimate biological basis of the psychical," the very "nucleus of the unconscious" (p. xxiii). For him this was the physical event of birth, whereby the infant passes from a state of perfectly contented union with the mother to a state of parlous separation via an oppressive experience of asphyxiation, constriction, confinement in the vaginal canal, and so on-all feelings recognizable in anxiety states of every kind. It was the struggle against this traumatic experience of birth, in Rank's account, that structured the fantasy life of the child, including the disavowal of the difference between the sexes, infantile sexual theories, and oedipal scenarios. Castration anxiety was a defensive derivative of the anxiety associated with the birth trauma.

THE prominent civilized nations--the Babylonians and Egyptians, the Hebrews and Hindus, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans, as well as the Teutons and others--all began at an early stage to glorify their national heroes--mythical princes and kings, founders of religions, dynasties, empires, or cities--in a number of poetic tales and legends. The history of the birth and of the early life of these personalities came to be especially invested with fantastic features, which in different nations--even though widely separated by space and entirely independent of each other--present a baffling similarity or, in part, a literal correspondence. Many investigators have long been impressed with this fact, and one of the chief problems of mythological research still consists in the elucidation of the reason for the extensive analogies in the fundamental outlines of mythical tales, which are rendered still more puzzling by the unanimity in certain details and their reappearance in most of the mythical groupings.

Whether we love or hate Sigmund Freud, we all have to admit that he revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. Much of this revolution can be traced to The Interpretation of Dreams, the turn-of-the-century tour de force that outlined his theory of unconscious forces in the context of dream analysis. Introducing the id, the superego & their problem child, the ego, Freud advanced scientific understanding of the mind immeasurably by exposing motivations normally invisible to our consciousness. While there's no question that his own biases & neuroses influenced his observations, the details are less important than the paradigm shift as a whole. After Freud, our interior lives became richer & vastly more mysterious. These mysteries clearly bothered him--he went to great (often absurd) lengths to explain dream imagery in terms of childhood sexual trauma, a component of his theory jettisoned mid-century, tho now popular among recovered-memory therapists. His dispassionate analyses of his own dreams are excellent studies for cognitive scientists wishing to learn how to sacrifice their vanities for the cause of learning. Freud said of the work contained in The Interpretation of Dreams, "Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime." One would have to feel quite fortunate to shake the world even once.--Rob Lightner