Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank

Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank (New York: Free Press, 1985; reissued with a new preface by the University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) is the American psychiatrist E. James Lieberman's biography of Otto Rank (1884–1939), the first to cover his whole life and work. Drawing on the diary Rank kept as an adolescent, his correspondence and his published writings, it sets out to restore a man who had been Freud's closest younger associate and was afterwards disparaged in, or written out of, the standard histories of psychoanalysis. The book follows Rank from a poor family in Vienna, through a youth of self-education in Nietzsche and the culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna, to his meeting with Freud, to whom he brought the manuscript of his essay on the artist. It traces his years as secretary of the Wednesday Psychological Society, his doctorate, his studies of myth, the hero and the incest motif, his work as editor and publisher, and his place among the seven ring-holders of Freud's secret Committee, including his rivalry with Ernest Jones. The central chapters reconstruct the crisis of 1923–1926: Rank's work with Sándor Ferenczi on an active, relationship-centred therapy, the publication of The Trauma of Birth, Freud's cancer, the breakup of the Committee, and Freud's wavering between acceptance and rejection, until Rank left Vienna. Lieberman treats the break as an intellectual parting and a drama of father and son, not the outcome of mental illness; in the introduction, under the heading "History of a Libel", he contests the picture of Rank as disturbed that Jones's account had made standard. The later chapters follow Rank's independent years in Paris and the United States: his psychology of will and creativity, his view of the neurotic as a failed artist, Art and Artist, his work with Anaïs Nin, first his patient and then his assistant, his will therapy with its focus on the present relationship and on setting an end to treatment, his teaching at the Pennsylvania School of Social Work, his ostracism by organised psychoanalysis, and his death in New York in 1939, a month after Freud. An epilogue places Rank in the history of ideas, as a forerunner of relational, humanistic and existential therapies and an influence on writers and thinkers such as Nin, Henry Miller, Paul Goodman and Max Lerner.