Dream That Interprets Itself

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.

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 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 Freud Museum London; 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 CEU Review of Books (Budapest), 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). His most recent book is The Birth of Relationship Therapy: Carl Rogers Meets Otto Rank (Giessen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2022). He wrote the 2023 epilogue (entitled "Ernest Becker and the Rankian Century") 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, 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.