Otto Rank: A Biographical Study Based on Notebooks, Letters, Collected Writings, Therapeutic Achievements and Personal Associations

Otto Rank: A Biographical Study is the first biography of Otto Rank. It was written by Jessie Taft, the American social work educator who had been his analysand, translator and colleague, and published by the Julian Press in New York in 1958, nineteen years after his death. Taft retired in 1950 partly to put Rank's papers in order, which went to Columbia University, and the book draws on that material together with her own memories. In its foreword she sets out her aim: to present Rank as a genius and an artist in his own right, not as a disciple of Freud but in terms of his own self-development. The book is arranged in four parts, each resting on a different kind of source. The first follows Rank's youth in Vienna through the four diaries, or 'daybooks', that he kept between about 1903 and 1905, from which Taft gives extended extracts: a self-taught young man of modest background reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ibsen, working out ideas about the artist, and greeting his discovery of Freud's writings as a revelation. The second, built on letters, covers the two decades in Freud's circle: his introduction to Freud with the manuscript of Der Künstler, his years as secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and as an editor of its journals, and the conflict that followed The Trauma of Birth (1924). It shows how inwardly necessary the bond with Freud was to Rank, and how painful his separation from the Freudian group became. The third part, on the 'years of fulfillment' in Paris and New York until his death in 1939, rests on Taft's personal knowledge of him: his teaching at the Pennsylvania School of Social Work, the development of his psychology of the will and of a therapy centred on the patient's present relationship to the therapist, and the letters he wrote to her over many years. The last part characterizes Rank through Art and Artist (1932), which Taft reads as his final summing-up of a lifelong attempt to understand genius and its relation to culture. An appendix lists his published works. Written by a devoted follower, the book is partisan. But it was the first account to present Rank's side of his break with Freud from unpublished documents, and it remains a principal source for later studies of his life and thought.