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MANY YEARS AGO, BEFORE I BECAME a psychologist and a psychoanalyst, when I was about to leave for Vienna for training in these fields, I went to bid good-bye to Jessie Taft who had been my professor at the Pennsylvania School of Social Work. She had been analyzed by Otto Rank, was profoundly influenced by his thinking and was later to become his translator. She was not happy about my going to the Freudian-oriented Vienna Institute for Psychoanalysis, and she said: "In my opinion Rank was as far ahead of Freud as Freud was of the hypnotists." This did not deter me. In fact, I did not understand it. I put it down to the bias against Freudian psychology which was so prevalent in academic and professional circles at that time. It was only many years later that I came to understand the full significance of the remark.
Otto Rank was indeed way ahead of his time. But what do we mean by that, and what is its importance? From our current vantage point it must mean that his imagination, inventiveness and creativity led him to conclusions that we in our time hold to be true and valid, but which were not accepted in his time. But this is certainly equally true of Freud, or of any great, original thinker whose insights stretch beyond the accepted knowledge of his time. What is particularly unique about Rank, however, is that he perceived the relativity of truth; he understood that the interpretation of the psychology of man is dependent upon the frame of reference, the paradigm, the way of thinking of the historical time and place in which a psychological theory is formulated. Thus Freudian theory, for all its innovativeness, is inevitably limited first by the mechanistic, reductionistic