Full Description
Once considered Sigmund Freud's designated heir, Otto Rank was an interdisciplinary thinker and prodigious author of twenty-two books. After being expelled from Freud's inner circle in 1926--due to Freud's opposition to the pre-Oedipal thesis of The Trauma of Birth (1924)--Rank had a highly productive life as a teacher, psychotherapist, and writer.
In this book, noted Rank scholar Robert Kramer argues that Rank, not Freud, created modern psychotherapy, which focuses on the therapist-client relationship. Rank's "will therapy" and his teaching on relationship and the creative will impacted not only modern psychotherapy but also social work and existential psychology. His influence can particularly be seen in the work of Carl Rogers (Psychotherapy), Jessie Taft and Virginia Robinson (Social Work), and Rollo May and Irvin Yallom (Existential Psychology). A dazzling thinker, Rank influenced many artists and writers, including Samuel Beckett, Salvador Dalí, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, Betty Friedan, D. W. Winnicott, and, most significantly, Ernest Becker, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Denial of Death (1973).
Kramer argues that if the 20th century was the century of Freud, the 21st century is shaping up to be the century of Rank as no other psychoanalyst's theories have ever been tested with as much empirical rigor, and across so many different cultures, as those of Rank. This book translates Rank's complex thought into language any reader can grasp easily.
Contents
List of figures
Foreword
Preface
1: Creating modern psychotherapy
2: Self-leadership
3: The denial of death
4: Immortality
5: Difference versus likeness
6: "David and Goliath"
7: The will of the father
8: The will of the mother
9: Transference versus relationship
10: Feelings
11: How did Rank practice therapy?
12: Carl Rogers meets Otto Rank
13: Willing = feeling alive = guilt-feeling
14: I-Thou . . . Thou-I
15: Client-centered therapy
16: The daimonic, counter-willing, and an "other world"
17: Empathy and agape
Epilogue: "I was born beyond psychology"
Appendix A: Chronology of Rank's life and work
Appendix B: Annotated Bibliography of Selected Writings on Rank
Notes
References
Author's Note
Index
