Rank's Position in Freud's Circle and His Departure from the Group of Ringholders

At the start of the 1970s I followed an invitation of Virginia P. Robinson (in Doylestown, Pennsylvania), then President of the Otto Rank Association, and of Anita Faatz, who is President of the Association today; at that time I started to study the correspondence of Otto Rank as collected and deposited in the archives of the Columbia University Library.

The results of my investigation were reported in two essays, both published in the Journal of the Otto Rank Association, in 1971 and 1974. Two letters handwritten by Sigmund Freud and addressed to Otto Rank from the year 1916 were also found folded between the pages of a German manuscript, about Homer and written by Rank. They were transcribed and translated by Etelka Grotjahn, commented on and annotated by me. The final publication of these two letters has so far not been possible since permission for publication could not be obtained from the Freud Copyright, Ltd. in London. As reason for withholding permission a representative of the Copyright, Ltd. stated that such early Freud letters were rare and would be published at a later date in their own translation. They still await this publication.

In the meantime, the letters have been sold at auction and are presumably owned by the Freud Archives as part of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

In addition, I reviewed several volumes of the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in the earliest years, as originally written by Otto Rank, the Secretary of the Society at that time. In a report about my investigations I stated