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After studying these books in the German original and the careful and competent translation; after testing Rank's ideas in practice, two firm convictions emerge: (1) These works contain much original and valuable material. (2) Reading Rank is like reading Nietzsche. The student has to extricate the gems of insight from a mass of paradoxical over-simplifications, excessive assertions and unqualified denials. But, unlike Nietzsche, Rank often wraps his thought in a difficult style.
These books should be labelled “for specialists only”. One pities the ordinary reader, who may be encouraged by the make-up of the paper covers to expect popular or generally interesting contents. One fears still more that scientifically trained psychologists will lose patience with Rank's habit of making the most disputable statements without presenting an iota of evidence. Practising psychotherapists can make good this defect from their experience; but psychoanalysts may be tempted to reject what is valid in Rank's criticisms, because in these sections of his work his exaggerations are most bovious, and his desire to show that “his present position is a wholly independent one”.
After many years of writing books like Das Inzest-Motiv, in which he conscientiously accumulates evidence for the analytical theories, here Rank swings far away from his old loyalty to Freud and natural science: he now imitates Nietzsche, whom he reveres as the first and only psychologist (T. R., p. 36). With one blow all his teachers and colleagues are destroyed because they fail to keep their theories pure and undefiled by moral, sociological or pedagogical ingredients.
Though Rank clearly sees that a new collective ideology is necessary, he insists in elaborating his theory and therapy in total isolation. Yet his will psychology, when freed of its individualistic imbalance,