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In most sectors of “mainstream” psychoanalysis worldwide, interest in the work of Otto Rank has almost faded from view. There have been notable journal tributes—including a highly informative issue of American Imago edited by Peter Rudnytsky in 1984, honoring Rank as a founder of that journal in 1912, and a special issue in 2012 of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, edited by Judith Dupont, titled “Recognizing Otto Rank, an Innovator.” There is a good 1985 biography, Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank, by E. James Lieberman, and another, published in 1958 by Rank's colleague from Philadephia, Jessica Taft. Robert Kramer, whose book I am reviewing here, is one of a handful of current leading scholars of Rank, and in chapter iii, “Otto Rank, Midwife of the Subject,” he usefully lists other writers interested in Rank, with dates of their papers and summaries of their contributions.
Kramer teaches leadership and transformative action at George Washington University and American University in Washington, D.C., and is a visiting professor at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. He has coedited, in a volume published in 2012, the two hundred fifty letters that passed between Freud and Rank from 1906 to 1925, documenting their close collaboration, their thinking, and their clashes (Lieberman and Kramer 2012). Also noteworthy is a 1996 book that makes Rank's rather tortuous writing and ideas accessible to the anglophone reader. Kramer now gives us this slender but intense, well-written, and fascinating book that is mostly about Rank's contributions, but additionally notes his influence on Carl Rogers's humanistic client-centered therapy and Rogers's turn to transcendence, especially at the end of his life. Kramer suggests Rogers and Rank as seminal hidden contributors to the relational trends that shape much of contemporary psychoanalysis. Rank has a stronger claim I believe, as he was steeped also in the field of psychoanalysis.
Kramer alludes throughout his b