“Some refuse the loan of life to avoid the debt of death.”

― Otto Rank, Will Therapy and Truth and Reality

The Psychoanalytic Vocation: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud

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Object relations, which emphasizes the importance of the preoedipal period and the infant-mother relationship, is considered by many analysts to be the major development in psychoanalytic theory since Freud. In this reinterpretation of its history Peter L. Rudnytsky focuses on two pivotal figures: Otto Rank, one of Freud's original and most brilliant disciples, who later broke away from psychoanalysis, and D. W. Winnicott, the leading representative of the Independent tradition in British psychoanalysis.

Rudnytsky begins with an overview arguing that object relations theory can synthesize the scientific and hermeneutic dimensions of psychoanalysis. He the uses the ideas of Rank and Winnicott to uncover the preoedipal aspects of Sophocles' Oedipus the King. After an appraisal of the relationship between Rank and Freud, he turns to Rank's neglected writings between 1924 and 1927 and shows how they anticipate contemporary object relations theory. Rudnytsky critically measures Winnicott's achievement against those of Heinz Kohut and Jacques Lacan, the founders of two competing schools of psychoanalysis, and compares Winnicott's life and work with Freud's. Next, using both published and unpublished accounts by the psychotherapist Harry Guntrip of his analyses with W. R. D. Fairbairn and Winnicott, he probes the personal and intellectual interactions among these three British clinicians. Rudnytsky concludes by advancing a psychoanalytic theory of the self as a rejoinder to the postmodernism that is the dominant ideology in literary studies today. In two appendices he makes available for the first time an English translation of Rank's "Genesis of the Object Relation" and a 1983 interview with Clare Winnicott.

Selected Books by D.W. Winnicott

• Playing and Reality

• Deprivation and Delinquency

• The Family and Individual Development

• Holding and Interpretation: Fragment of an Analysis

Selected Books on D.W. Winnicott

• Winnicott by Adam Phillips

• Tea with Winnicott

• Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of Winnicott's Use of Words

• Play and Reflection in Donald Winnicott's Writings by Andre Green 

• Winnicott and the Psychoanalytic Tradition: Interpretation and Other Psychoanalytic Issues

• Donald Winnicott Today

• Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby: Personal and Professional Perspectives

• Between Winnicott and Lacan: A Clinical Engagement

Beyond Psychology by Otto Rank

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A plea for the acceptance of the irrational element in man is the most vital part of human life. Rank discusses the ultimates — psychological concepts which go beyond the individual's makeup, such as fear of death, desire for immortality, sexuality, and the need for love — and the institutions which support these concepts.

Double: A Psychoanalytic Study by Otto Rank

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Alive, fresh, and stimulating, the theme of The Double comprises the issues of identity, narcissism, and the fear of death--actually the core of human existence. Rank's book is primarily a study of the double as it appeared in striking examples in German, French, Russian, English, and American literature from Goethe to Oscar Wilde.

The Psychology and Psychotherapy of Otto Rank

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Otto Rank, an Austrian psychologist, was a protégé of Sigmund Freud, who saw in young Rank a gifted mind and drew him into his inner circle. The Psychology and Psychotherapy of Otto Rank is author Fay B. Karpf’s historical and comparative introduction to the theory and therapy of Otto Rank, his relation to Freud, Jung, and Adler and to significant developments in the fields of analysis, psychotherapy, counseling, education, and social work. Fay B. Karpf was one of the earliest Jewish American woman sociologists. Born in Austria in 1893, Karpf eventually immigrated to the United States, where she attended the University of Chicago. She immersed herself in the “Chicago School of Sociology,” and her first book, American Social Psychology: Its Origins, Development and European Background (1932), was a standard textbook in the field of social psychology. She studied with the psychoanalyst Otto Rank, and she later taught social work at the Training School for Jewish Social Work in New York. After the school unfortunately closed, Karpf moved with her husband to Los Angeles, where she became a practicing counselor and psychotherapist, and she continued contributing to the fields until her death in 1981.

Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank

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Once Freud's most favoured student and associate, Otto Rank came to be reviled by the psychoanalytic establishment that formerly revered him. This biography exposes the hostile, at time libelious treatment of Rank in the standard histories of psychoanalysis and shows him to be a great analytic pioneer of this century. His influence was felt not only by mental health professionals, but also by such artists and writers as Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Paul Goodman and Max Lerner.

Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck

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In a stunning fusion of literary criticism and intellectual history, Peter L. Rudnytsky explores the dialectical interplay between literature and psychoanalysis by reading key psychoanalytic texts in a variety of genres. He maps the origins of the contemporary relational tradition in the lives and work of three of Freud's most brilliant and original disciples—Otto Rank, Sándor Ferenczi, and Georg Groddeck. Rudnytsky, a scholar with an unsurpassed knowledge of the world of clinical psychoanalysis, espouses the "relational turn" as an alternative to both ego psychology and postmodernism.

Rudnytsky seeks to alter the received view of the psychoanalytic landscape, in which the towering figure of Freud has continued to obscure the achievements of his followers who individually resisted and collectively went beyond him. Reading Psychoanalysis offers the most detailed and comprehensive treatments available in English of such classic texts as Freud's case of Little Hans, Rank's The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend, and Groddeck's The Book of the It. Rudnytsky's argument for object relations theory concludes by boldly affirming the possibility of a "consilience" between scientific and hermeneutic modes of knowledge.

 

The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis

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Sigmund Freud’s relationship with Otto Rank was the most constant, close, and significant of his professional life. Freud considered Rank to be the most brilliant of his disciples. The two collaborated on psychoanalytic writing, practice, and politics; Rank was the managing director of Freud’s publishing house; and after several years helping Freud update his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, Rank contributed two chapters. His was the only other name ever to be listed on the title page. This complete collection of the known correspondence between the two brings to life their twenty-year collaboration and their painful break.

The 250 letters compiled by E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer humanize and dramatize psychoanalytic thinking, practice, and organization from 1906 through 1925. The letters concern not just the work and trenchant contemporaneous observations of Freud and Rank but also their friendships, supporters, rivals, families, travels, and other personal and professional matters. Most interestingly, the letters trace Rank’s growing independence, the father-son schism over Rank’s "anti-Oedipal" heresy, his surprising reconciliation with Freud, and the moment when they parted ways permanently. A candid picture of how the pioneers of modern psychotherapy behaved with their patients, colleagues, and families—and each other—the correspondence between Freud and Rank demonstrates how psychoanalysis developed in relation to early twentieth-century science, art, philosophy, and politics.

A rich primary source on psychiatry, history, and culture, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank is a cogent and powerful narrative of early psychoanalysis and its two most important personalities.

See also:

• The Freud-Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung

• The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi

• The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham

• The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones

A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures by Otto Rank

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A leading disciple and confidant of Freud, Otto Rank revolutionized the field of psychoanalytic theory in The Trauma of Birth (1924). In this book, Rank proposed that the child's pre-Oedipal relationship to the mother was the prototype of the therapeutic relationship between analyst and patient. Although Rank is now widely acknowledged as the most important precursor of humanistic and existential psychotherapy--influencing such well-known writers as Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and Ernest Becker--Rank's knotty prose has long frustrated readers. In this volume of Rank's lectures, Robert Kramer has brought together for the first time the innovator's clearest explanations of his most influential theories.

The lectures were delivered in English to receptive audiences of social workers, therapists, and clinical psychologists throughout the United States from 1924 to 1938, the year before Rank's untimely death. The topics covered include separation and individuation, projection and identification, love and will, relationship therapy, and neurosis as a failure in creativity. The lectures reveal that Rank, much maligned by orthodox analysts, invented the modern object-relations approach to psychotherapy in the 1920s. In his introduction, based on private correspondence between Rank, Freud, and others in the inner circle, Robert Kramer tells the full story of why Rank parted ways with Freud. The collection of lectures constitutes a "readable Rank," filled with insights still relevant today, for those interested in the humanistic, existential, or object- relational aspects of psychotherapy, or in the development of the psychoanalytic movement.

The Trauma of Birth by Otto Rank

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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.