A Dream That Interprets Itself
Book Details
- Publisher : Phoenix Publishing House
- Published : 2023
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 120
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 97104
- ISBN 13 : 9781800132054
- ISBN 10 : 9781800132
About the Author(s)
Freud considered Otto Rank to be the most brilliant of his disciples. With access to the master’s most intimate thoughts and feelings, Rank contributed two chapters to The Interpretation of Dreams in 1914. His name would appear below Freud’s on the title page for the next 15 years.
In the wake of Freud’s rage against the pre-Oedipal thesis of The Trauma of Birth (1924), which proposed the heresy that mothers are just as powerful as fathers, those Rank had trained as analysts in Vienna were required to be re-analysed by Freudians in order to retain their credentials. Co-creator of the psychoanalytic movement with Freud, Rank was now anathema. His enemies in the inner circle, especially Ernest Jones, ‘fell on him like dogs,’ said Helene Deutsch, an early analyst.
For almost a century, Rank has been vilified, ignored, or simply forgotten by the psychoanalytic establishment. But with the publication in 1973 of Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer-prize winning, The Denial of Death, Rank’s fortunes began to change dramatically. Single-handedly, Becker brought Rank back from the dead, making a powerful case that Rank was the most brilliant mind in Freud’s circle, with more insight into human nature than even the master himself.
If the 20th century was Freud’s, the 21st century, as Becker predicted fifty years ago, is shaping up to be Rank’s, ‘the brooding genius waiting in the wings,’ according to Irvin Yalom.
Robert Kramer, PhD, is Visiting Professor of Psychology at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, and a practising Rankian psychoanalyst, the only one in the world. He has lectured on the life and work of Otto Rank at the 3rd World Congress on Existential Psychology (2023) in Athens, Greece; Sigmund Freud University in Vienna; Corvinus University of Budapest; George Washington University; American University; the American Psychological Association; the International Psychoanalytical Association; the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna; The Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel; the University of Athens Medical School, Greece; the International Institute of Existential and Humanistic Psychology, Beijing; the William Alanson White Institute, New York; the Indiana Society for Psychoanalytic Thought in Indianapolis; the Existential-Humanistic Institute, San Francisco; and the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work in Philadelphia.
He has published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times of Israel (Tel Aviv), and The New European (London). During academic year 2015–2016, he was the inaugural International Chair of Public Leadership at the National University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary. In 2016, he resigned his chair in protest against the corruption of the Orbán regime.
His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals in the US, the UK and, in translation, in Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Spain. His latest article, Discovering the Existential Unconscious: Rollo May Encounters Otto Rank (The Humanistic Psychologist, 2023) has been published in translation in Chinese and Russian, and is now being translated into Greek, Turkish and Hungarian. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (US), founded by Abraham Maslow.
He edited and introduced Otto Rank’s A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures and co-edited, with E. J. Lieberman, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis.
He wrote the 2023 afterword (entitled Reading Becker, Reading Rank) for the fiftieth anniversary edition of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, which won the Pulitzer prize in 1974.
Gregory C. Richter (PhD in Linguistics, University of California San Diego, 1982) taught German and Linguistics at Truman State University, Missouri, from 1983 to 2022. He maintains interests in formal linguistics and in translation theory. His publications include numerous translations from German, and centre on Viennese psychoanalysis. He has produced new renderings of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2011), The Future of an Illusion (2012), and Civilization and its Discontents (2015) by Sigmund Freud, all at Broadview Press. He has also produced translations of Otto Rank’s The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (1992), Psychology and the Soul (1998, with E. James Lieberman), and The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (2004, with E. James Lieberman), all at Johns Hopkins University Press. More recently, he served as translator for The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis (2011, edited by E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer), Johns Hopkins University Press. Other publications include translations of works in French and Chinese. In the past few years, he has also served as copy editor for two presses – Ex Ophidia Press and Plain Wrapper Press Redux.