Tola Rank

Although I cannot say that I have any special competence in the history of women, I do have a commitment to writing about people who have been misunderstood or left out of the recorded past. Voltaire was only one thinker to have been appalled by how unreliable historical knowledge can be. It was he who said, “History is nothing but a pack of tricks which we play on the dead” (Woodward, 1955, p. 3). As I look back on those few events in my own experience that have mattered enough to get covered in the press, or even to appear in books, my skepticism about how history gets written has to be enhanced.

After my own interviews with 25 of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic cases in the mid-1960s, it is hard for me now to be, like so many others, particularly interested in reconstructing the Freud of the 1890s. Critically important though that period was for the history of analysis, it was a time for which no one I ever met could offer any first-hand evidence. The distortions that exist about what I think I know best are so grievous that I scarcely can conceive how to begin to handle the more remote past. If I have now picked Tola Rank as the subject of this essay, it is out of a general concern with historiography in general, and with underdogs. For she is in real danger, I believe, of being forgotten, even though she should rank among the pioneers in psychoanalysis.

Yet I also think that if she were to be securely established in history, it would be better if instead a woman were writing about her. The current climate of opinion is such that women writing about other women have far more persuasive power. The problem is that I think it is unwise to rely on someone else to do what needs to be done, since for one reason or another our culture remains committed to an ideology of success. The fact that Tola Rank had so hard a life means she is not apt to attract the interest of writers; it seems to be much easier to insure an audience with the retelling