When it became clear that Freud was in fact not in denial about his condition, Rank, back in Vienna, and faced with stern criticism from a very much alive Freud, had a second crisis in which he then retracted his theories:. In order to salvage his status, and to undo the damage he had caused, Rank offered to return to America and to publicly recant his former views.
However, once back in the US, Rank remained silent rather than renouncing his previous position. Unfortunately, these phantastic theories were extremely influential in the US. He anticipated and influenced interpersonal, existential, client-centered, Gestalt, and relationship therapies.
The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
Freud too is constantly wary in the same vein; Lou Andreas-Salome writes in her diary:. I understand very well that men of intelligence and ability like Otto Rank, who is a son and nothing but a son, represent for Freud something far more to be desired [than Carl Jung, or Victor Tausk]. He says of Rank: Jones and then Abraham, whom Rank clearly saw as his chief rivals, were the main targets of his ire.
Only Ferenczi, with whom he formed a close tie, escaped unscathed. In one particularly charged letter Freud wrote to Rank,. In conceiving of the Committee as structured along familial lines, Freud misrecognized the incompatibility between family and psychoanalysis. As Bernfeld noted, the disciples reacted in two distinctly pathological manners. In a manic episode triggered by his belief that he was the chosen heir, Rank developed a theory of a fatherless family,3 while believing himself to be the uncastrated master.
The others erected the bureaucracy that became the IPA, with its regulations, qualifications, requirements, and exclusions, the ultimate aim of which was to safeguard against castration. Then they sought a guarantee by aligning themselves with medicine, the perceived uncastrated masters, thus reproducing their position of impotence in relation to a master.
The significance of this moment, which is a logical moment, is precisely the recognition of castration: It is the recognition of the operation of castration that will allow the analysand to act in accordance with his desire. Desire, which the will opposes and masks. The end of an analysis is marked by a shift from a position of impotence to one of impossibility.
However, the position of impotence is one of constant frustration and envy, the epitome of neurotic misery. The recognition of desire is founded on the recognition of a loss that sustains desire as, among other things, the possibility of a substitution, of something else in place of the lost object, in place of the neurotic hope for the return of the lost object.
The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis
But one is tempted to punctuate in the margin, but are they anything else? Certainly any attempt at developing an organizing structure is contingent and risks failure; the history of psychoanalysis is littered with failed attempts at creating a truly psychoanalytic association, the worst failures having been the most successful bureaucracies! If the attempts have failed it is because they are confronted with a structural impossibility, but paradoxically, it is only the recognition of that impossibility that offers a possibility of a successful outcome.
If an association of psychoanalysts is to sustain the relation of its members to psychoanalysis, it must somehow account for the impossible.
In this Book
An organization that derives its coherence on the basis of a phantasm of an omnipotent master can only result in an impasse, consigning its members to futility and impotence. It was not until about 16 years after the initial appearance of the life-threatening illness that threw his followers into disarray that Freud finally succumbed to his cancer on September 23, Barely more than one month later, on October 31, , Otto Rank died from a sudden, rapidly progressing illness, perhaps an infection or a reaction to medication he was taking for kidney problems.
His last reported remark: Le Transfert dans tous ses eratta, Paris: Psychoanalytic Quarterly , pp. I , London, UK: Jokes and their relation to the unconscious.
- See a Problem?.
- Une mère russe (Les Cahiers Rouges) (French Edition).
- The Letters of Sigmund Freud & Otto Rank (Book Review);
- VITTORIOS WOMAN (Vittorio Series Book 1)?
Group psychology and analysis of the ego. The self and the object world. International Universities Press, Inc. The life and work of Sigmund Freud vol. The other side of psychoanalysis: The language of psychoanalysis. Otto Rank psychologist and philosopher Vienna— New York. Freud considered Rank to be the most brilliant of his disciples. His was the only other name ever to be listed on the title page.
- I Believe, I Receive, I Take I am Healed.
- About the Author;
- Il mio piacere proibito (Italian Edition).
- The Lost 500 Years: What Happened Between the Old and New Testaments.
- Subjects, Lesbian Adventure Club: Book 17;
This complete collection of the known correspondence between the two brings to life their twenty-year collaboration and their painful break. The letters compiled by E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer humanize and dramatize psychoanalytic thinking, practice, and organization from through The letters concern not just the work and trenchant contemporaneous observations of Freud and Rank but also their friendships, supporters, rivals, families, travels, and other personal and professional matters.
The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis
A candid picture of how the pioneers of modern psychotherapy behaved with their patients, colleagues, and families—and each other—the correspondence between Freud and Rank demonstrates how psychoanalysis developed in relation to early twentieth-century science, art, philosophy, and politics. A rich primary source on psychiatry, history, and culture, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank is a cogent and powerful narrative of early psychoanalysis and its two most important personalities.
He is the editor of A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures of Otto Rank.