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The place of Otto Rank—favored son, man Friday, erudite, bad boy, or simply mad—in the history of psychoanalytic ideas can now be reconsidered in the light of his United States lectures delivered between 1924 and 1938. Until now if this curious and contradictory figure has found any spot on the analyst's bookshelf, it
is probably in some dark and dusty corner, and there primarily through the efforts of Anais Nïn and Ernest Becker.
How is this state of affairs to be understood? Certainly, that he died early and was disinclined to defend himself and that his work has been poorly summarized contributed. Rank covered a wide range of topics and could be intemperate at times, his thoughts seeming to fly from the page—still more support for his ideas being stricken from the record books. Perhaps the riddle comes closer to being solved if we consider, while reading A Psychology of Difference, that Rank is yet one more example of a quandary that has followed the organizational life of psychoanalysis—the enduring attempt to create theories of pathogenesis that are specific and simplified.
It may enrich our understanding of this psychoanalytic icon's fate if we enter the milieu Rank was working in. It is part of our received knowledge that Freud encouraged and nurtured Rank and that he was being cultivated to take the seat at the head of the psychoanalytic table and perhaps even the hand of his adored Anna. What is less appreciated is how thoroughly Rank repaid his debt. While completing his doctoral studies, he was a secretary, cataloguer, and proofreader for Freud and later shared the onerous task of helping run the Journals and publishing houses.
That Rank had such easy access to the Professor's ear did not sit well with the brotherhood. Whatever sympathy the retiring Rank could curry was diminished by his nonmedical status (although Freud so counseled him as well as Pfister and Anna) and his not having undergone analysis. It took a mighty effort, even from such a strong lea