Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank

Sigmund Freud's relationship with Otto Rank was the most constant, close, and significant of his professional life. Freud considered Rank to be the most brilliant of his disciples. The two collaborated on psychoanalytic writing, practice, and politics; Rank was the managing director of Freud's publishing house; and after several years helping Freud update his masterpiece, The Interpretation of Dreams, Rank contributed two chapters. His was the only other name ever to be listed on the title page. This complete collection of the known correspondence between the two brings to life their twenty-year collaboration and their painful break. The 250 letters between Freud and Rank compiled by E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer humanize and dramatize psychoanalytic thinking, practice, and organization from 1906 through 1925. The letters concern not just the work and trenchant contemporaneous observations of the two but also their friendships, supporters, rivals, families, travels, and other details about their personal and professional lives. Most interestingly, the letters trace Rank's growing independence, the father-son schism over Rank's "anti-Oedipal" heresy, their surprising reconciliation, and the moment when the two parted ways permanently. Presenting a candid picture of how the pioneers of modern psychotherapy behaved with their patients, colleagues, and families, the correspondence between Freud and Rank demonstrates how psychoanalysis grew in relation to early twentieth-century science, art, philosophy, and politics. A rich primary source on psychology, history, and culture, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank is a cogent and powerful narrative of the history of early psychoanalysis and its two most important personalities.

E. James Lieberman, M.D., is a clinical professor emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the George Washington University School of Medicine. He has authored and edited a number of books, including Otto Rank's Psychology of the Soul and The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, both also published by Johns Hopkins. Robert Kramer, Ph.D., is the editor of A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures of Otto Rank.