His Own Man

Lieberman, E. James, Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank. New York: The Free Press, 1985.

THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MOVEMENT, like all movements—religious, political, social or philosophical—has never been kind to dissidents or revisionists. In the case of Otto Rank, who deviated from, and subsequently challenged much of Freudian theory, the Freudian establishment has been strikingly unkind. It has annihilated him with silence and has obliterated his name, much as an unkind parent might refuse to speak to a child who had misbehaved. Perhaps this is precisely because for twenty years Rank occupied a filial position in relation to Freud, so that his challenge to Freudian thought was experienced as disloyalty. "The little society [Freud's original, small group of disciples] acquired in him [Rank] a zealous and dependable secretary, and I gained in Otto Rank a faithful helper and co-worker, " wrote Freud. Rank was far from disloyal, but he was primarily true to his own perceptions and to his own thought. He was a man of his own will.

James Lieberman's book about Otto Rank is a well-researched, well-documented biography, even though, in Rank's case, it is especially difficult to separate the life of the man from his work. Perhaps this is so because the loneliness of Rank's early childhood, which then merged into a very conflictful adolescence, was perpetuated to some extent in the privacy of his personal and emotional life. Little is known about his feelings in personal relationships. His character and personality do emerge in his creative thinking and in the nature of his professional and semi-professional relationships. While there are passages in Lieberman's volume that poignantly reveal the depth and creativity of Rank's thinking, Acts of Will is not first and foremost a theoretical work. However, since before the appearance of this book relatively little had been written about Rank except for my own work, that of Jessie Taft and Fay Karpf, Lieberman's