Along with Adler and Jung, Otto Rank was one of the intellectual giants in the inner circle around Sigmund Freud. Art and artist, his major statement on the relationship of art to the individual and society, pursues in a broader cultural context Freud's ideas on art and neurosis and has had an important influence on many twentieth-century writers and thinkers, beginning with Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Art and artist explores the human urge to create in all its complex aspects, in terms not only of individual works of art but of religion, mythology, and social institutions as well. Based firmly on Rank's knowledge of psychology and psychoanalysis, it ranges widely through anthropology and cultural history, reaching beyond psychology to a broad understanding of human nature. - Back cover

A leading disciple and confidant of Freud, Otto Rank revolutionized the field of psychoanalytic theory in The Trauma of Birth (1924). In this book, Rank proposed that the child's pre-Oedipal relationship to the mother was the prototype of the therapeutic relationship between analyst and patient. Although Rank is now widely acknowledged as the most important precursor of humanistic and existential psychotherapy--influencing such well-known writers as Carl Rogers, Rollo May, and Ernest Becker--Rank's knotty prose has long frustrated readers. In this volume of Rank's lectures, Robert Kramer has brought together for the first time the innovator's clearest explanations of his most influential theories. The lectures were delivered in English to receptive audiences of social workers, therapists, and clinical psychologists throughout the United States from 1924 to 1938, the year before Rank's untimely death. The topics covered include separation and individuation, projection and identification, love and will, relationship therapy, and neurosis as a failure in creativity. The lectures reveal that Rank, much maligned by orthodox analysts, invented the modern object-relations approach to psychotherapy in the 1920s. In his introduction, based on private correspondence between Rank, Freud, and others in the inner circle, Robert Kramer tells the full story of why Rank parted ways with Freud. The collection of lectures constitutes a "readable Rank," filled with insights still relevant today, for those interested in the humanistic, existential, or object- relational aspects of psychotherapy, or in the development of the psychoanalytic movement.

Anticipating one of the central findings of post-Freudian psychiatry, he argues that "truth" is irrelevant to the work of therapy. He contrasts the negative externalization of will, which leads to denial and guilt, with the creative power of will, tracing this conflict in both the individual and the history of human society. Rank's development of will psychology led him to a philosophy of the psychological, outlined in Truth and Reality . Here he explores the psychological determinants of the relationship of inner world to outer reality.