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By Otto Rank. Translated by Jessie Taft. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936. 292 pp.
TRUTH AND REALITY: A Life History of the Human Will. By Otto Rank. Translated by Jessie Taft. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936. 193 pp.
There is inherent in any attempt to describe the mind and its workings a certain logical and psychological difficulty created by the self-referential nature of the material. In logic this is the type of contradiction known as the Epimenides. Freud decided that this was no bar to the construction of a science of the mind. Rank came to the conclusion—from considerations discovered during the writing of Truth and Reality but really developed elsewhere (in his book Seelenglaube und Psychologie, the composition of which was interpolated between the writing of books one and two of Will Therapy)—that even if this difficulty could be avoided, a science of psychology still did not provide an adequate and satisfactory therapeutic ideology because "psychology represents a purely individualistic ideology, indeed the most individualistic ideology possible, while every effective therapeutic ideology must be collective". He was brought to this idea from his discovery of a will, which he believes has been overlooked by the freudians, and to which his attention was brought by ideas originating in part from his investigations of the trauma of birth. This source, however, should not prejudice psychoanalysts against the general nature of the problem Rank poses.
The same problem was developed from a totally different starting point in Seelenglaube und Psychologie in which Rank analyzes the difficulties arising when the psyche tries to build for itself a soul with which to deny death, and in so doing constructs a conceptual picture of itself which it then begins to treat as the required soul but which proves to be an illusion since it does not provide the wished for individual immortality. This brief hint must suffice to indicate what Rank believes to be the bas