SEND US A MESSAGE
CONTACT INFORMATION
Whether you’re looking for answers, would like to solve a problem, or just want to let us know how we did, we are always happy to hear from you.
Whether you’re looking for answers, would like to solve a problem, or just want to let us know how we did, we are always happy to hear from you.
Phoenix Publishing House
62 Bucknell Road, Bicester
Oxfordshire OX26 2DS
United Kingdom
Email: hello@firingthemind.com
Phone: +44 (0)20 8442 1376
62 Bucknell Road, Bicester
Oxfordshire OX26 2DS
United Kingdom
+44 (0)20 8442 1376
hello@firingthemind.com
Whether you’re looking for answers, would like to solve a problem, or just want to let us know how we did, we are always happy to hear from you.
£13.49 – £19.99
Otto Rank, Sigmund Freud’s closest colleague in Vienna during the formative years of psychoanalysis, published the essay ‘A Dream That Interprets Itself’ in 1910. It was praised highly by Freud, and the seminal essay now appears for the first time in English with an expertly crafted introduction from Robert Kramer about Rank and his work.
Due to be published in September 2023.
Author | Otto Rank |
---|---|
Editor | Robert Kramer |
Translator | Gregory Richter |
ISBN | 9781800132054 |
Format | Paperback, e-Book, Print & e-Book |
Page Extent | 120 |
Publication Date | September 2023 |
Subject Areas | Psychoanalysis |
Sigmund Freud hired Otto Rank as his secretary and funded Rank’s PhD in literature at the University of Vienna. In 1910, at age 26, Rank published ‘A Dream That Interprets Itself’. Freud could not praise the essay highly enough; impressed by Rank’s erudition, Freud invited his protégé to contribute two chapters, on poetry and myth, in 1914 to The Interpretation of Dreams. Thereafter, Rank’s name would appear under Freud’s on the title page of the foundational text of psychoanalysis for the next fifteen years.
Grateful for Freud’s generosity, Rank published a stream of articles and books advancing psychoanalytic thinking into almost every area of the arts and humanities, thus demonstrating to Freud’s critics that the validity of psychoanalysis did not hinge solely on his autobiographical work The Interpretation of Dreams. Rank died in 1939 and his work fell out of favor until a renaissance of interest beginning in the 1970s.
This is the first English translation of Rank’s masterpiece of dream interpretation, originally published in 1910 as “Ein Traum, der sich selbst deutet” in the journal Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen, 2(2): 465–540. It is accompanied by an in-depth introduction from editor Robert Kramer, the world’s only Rankian psychologist. The book is essential reading for all psychoanalytic scholars, practitioners, and historians, and those interested in dream analysis.
Freud considered Otto Rank to be the most brilliant of his disciples. With access to the master’s most intimate thoughts and feelings, Rank contributed two chapters to The Interpretation of Dreams in 1914. His name would appear below Freud’s on the title page for the next 15 years.
In the wake of Freud’s rage against the pre-Oedipal thesis of The Trauma of Birth (1924), which proposed the heresy that mothers are just as powerful as fathers, those Rank had trained as analysts in Vienna were required to be re-analysed by Freudians in order to retain their credentials. Co-creator of the psychoanalytic movement with Freud, Rank was now anathema. His enemies in the inner circle, especially Ernest Jones, ‘fell on him like dogs,’ said Helene Deutsch, an early analyst.
For almost a century, Rank has been vilified, ignored, or simply forgotten by the psychoanalytic establishment. But with the publication in 1973 of Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer-prize winning The Denial of Death, Rank’s fortunes began to change dramatically. Single-handedly, Becker brought Rank back from the dead, making a powerful case that Rank was the most brilliant mind in Freud’s circle, with more insight into human nature than even the master himself.
If the 20th century was Freud’s, the 21st century, as Becker predicted fifty years ago, is shaping up to be Rank’s, ‘the brooding genius waiting in the wings,’ according to Irvin Yalom.
Robert Kramer, PhD, is Visiting Professor of Psychology at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, and a practising Rankian psychoanalyst, the only one in the world. He has lectured on the life and work of Otto Rank at the 3rd World Congress on Existential Psychology (2023) in Athens, Greece; Sigmund Freud University in Vienna; Corvinus University of Budapest; George Washington University; American University; the American Psychological Association; the International Psychoanalytical Association; the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna; The Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel; the University of Athens Medical School, Greece; the International Institute of Existential and Humanistic Psychology, Beijing; the William Alanson White Institute, New York; the Indiana Society for Psychoanalytic Thought in Indianapolis; the Existential-Humanistic Institute, San Francisco; and the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work in Philadelphia.
He has published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times of Israel (Tel Aviv), and The New European (London). During academic year 2015–2016, he was the inaugural International Chair of Public Leadership at the National University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary. In 2016, he resigned his chair in protest against the corruption of the Orbán regime.
His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals in the US, the UK and, in translation, in Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Spain. His latest article, “Discovering the Existential Unconscious: Rollo May Encounters Otto Rank” (The Humanistic Psychologist, 2023) has been published in translation in Chinese and Russian, and is now being translated into Greek, Turkish and Hungarian. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (US), founded by Abraham Maslow.
He edited and introduced Otto Rank’s A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures (Princeton University Press, 1996) and co-edited, with E. J. Lieberman, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
He wrote the 2023 afterword (entitled “Reading Becker, Reading Rank”) for the fiftieth anniversary edition of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, which won the Pulitzer prize in 1974.
His next book, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2023, is entitled, Carl Rogers, Otto Rank and the Creation of Modern Psychotherapy.
Gregory C. Richter (PhD in Linguistics, University of California San Diego, 1982) taught German and Linguistics at Truman State University, Missouri, from 1983 to 2022. He maintains interests in formal linguistics and in translation theory. His publications include numerous translations from German, and centre on Viennese psychoanalysis. He has produced new renderings of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2011), The Future of an Illusion (2012), and Civilization and its Discontents (2015) by Sigmund Freud, all at Broadview Press. He has also produced translations of Otto Rank’s The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (1992), Psychology and the Soul (1998, with E. James Lieberman), and The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (2004, with E. James Lieberman), all at Johns Hopkins University Press. More recently, he served as translator for The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis (2011, edited by E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer), Johns Hopkins University Press. Other publications include translations of works in French and Chinese. In the past few years, he has also served as copy editor for two presses – Ex Ophidia Press and Plain Wrapper Press Redux.
About the author
About the editor
About the translator
Introduction
Robert Kramer
A dream that interprets itself
Otto Rank
Index
You must be logged in to post a review.
JOIN THE PHOENIX FAMILY
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.