Rank Rediscovered

IT IS A PLEASURE TO DISCUSS Esther Menaker's review of Lieberman's recently published biography on Otto Rank. Only in the last few years, after half a century of embarrassing neglect, Rank's original ideas and clinical understanding have been rediscovered. First our appreciation goes to Esther Menaker for reintroducing us to Rank in her excellent book (1982) and her many papers and lectures over the last decade. Now E. James Lieberman presents a partisan biography, but better researched and reasoned than Jessie Taft's (1958) study. Lieberman made extensive use of the Rank archives at Columbia University, and interviewed still-living colleagues, friends and relatives of Rank, to present a complex picture of Rank, the complex man, interwoven with Rank's ideas and the intensive interplay of prominent personalities in the history of the psychoanalytic movement.

Menaker highlights the major concepts of Rank, affirming Lieberman's excellent perspective. I would like to take a different tack. I have been teaching Rank for many years to psychoanalytic candidates, and certain issues have been asked consistently: Why study Rank? What influence did he have on the development of psychoanalysis in the United States? Where did Rank stand on controversies extant among psychoanalysts today?

One major tenet of psychoanalysis, ever since its inception has been that the past informs the present and the analyst can learn from that. Psychoanalysis has been devoted to the unfolding of lives—a living oral autobiography—ever-changing, in the intimacy of the patient-analyst dyad. The other group of professionals most concerned with the individual's total life are biographers (along with historians). We also adapt our psychoanalytic skills of examining meanings and motivations and have assessed historically the great psychoanalysts of our past. We thereby keep rewriting history, correcting distorted views and filling in the gaps of our knowledge with regard to our forefathers' ide