Otto Rank

Explores the human urge to create, in terms of art, religion, mythology, and social institutions, and seeks to understand the relationship of art to the individual and to society

Creative Urge and Personality Development

Art and Artist

Originally published in German in 1909, Otto Rank's The Myth of the Birth of the Hero offered psychoanalytical interpretations of mythological stories as a means of understanding the human psyche. Like his mentor Freud, Rank compared the myths of such figures as Oedipus, Moses, and Sargon with common dreams, seeing in both a symbolic fulfillment of repressed desire. Thirteen years later, Rank substantially revised this seminal work, incorporating new discoveries in psychoanalysis, mythology, and ethnology, doubling the size of the book. This expanded second edition has never before been available in English. For the second edition, Rank added anthropological considerations of primitive and civilized peoples to those of mythology; extensive discussions of birth dreams, flood legends, and rescue fantasies; and new mythological examples—among them Dionysus, Kullervo (a precursor of Hamlet), Trakhan, and Tristan—as well as fuller treatments of Sargon and Moses. Eloquently translated by Gregory C. Richter and E. James Lieberman, this volume also includes an introductory essay by Robert A. Segal and Rank's 1914 essay, "The Play in Hamlet."

A Psychological Exploration of Myth

The Myth of the Birth of the Hero

Jessie Taft

Explores the relationship of a person's inner world to the outer world of reality, and suggests ways to manipulate the outer world through positive externalization of the will

Truth and Reality

A Psychoanalytic Study

The Double

A plea for the acceptance of the irrational element in man is the most vital part of human life and Rank discusses the ultimates: death, immortality, sexuality, and love.

Beyond Psychology

Pedro Ayora Ballester

El doble - Un estudio psicoanalítico del Doppelgänger

Dogum Travmasi

A protégé of Freud, Rank parted ways with his mentor over the controversial thesis in this book—that anxiety neurosis is caused by profound psychological trauma which occurs at birth.

The Trauma of Birth

Revealing Rank's intellectual development during this period, they treat such topics as projection and identification, love and will, neurosis as a failure in creativity, and object-relations theory.

The American Lectures

A Psychology of Difference

Will Therapy/Truth and Reality

Alan Dundes

Lord Fitzroy Richard Somerset Raglan

In Quest of the Hero makes available for a new generation of readers two key works on hero myths: Otto Rank's Myth of the Birth of the Hero and the central section of Lord Raglan's The Hero. Amplifying these is Alan Dundes's fascinating contemporary inquiry, "The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus." Examined here are the patterns found in the lore surrounding historical or legendary figures like Gilgamesh, Moses, David, Oedipus, Odysseus, Perseus, Heracles, Aeneas, Romulus, Siegfried, Lohengrin, Arthur, and Buddha. Rank's monograph remains the classic application of Freudian theory to hero myths. In The Hero the noted English ethnologist Raglan singles out the myth-ritualist pattern in James Frazer's many-sided Golden Bough and applies that pattern to hero myths. Dundes, the eminent folklorist at the University of California at Berkeley, applies the theories of Rank, Raglan, and others to the case of Jesus. In his introduction to this selection from Rank, Raglan, and Dundes, Robert Segal, author of the major study of Joseph Campbell, charts the history of theorizing about hero myths and compares the approaches of Rank, Raglan, Dundes, and Campbell.

In Quest of the Hero

In his last years, Otto Rank turned his lifetime of thought and learning toward two of the most difficult topics in human history: religion and the soul. The result was this now-classic work, available in this new, very accessible English translation. Unlike many other intellectuals of the twentieth century, Rank maintains a place for the soul rather than dismissing it as a fantasy. The soul and the beliefs about it, he argues, set forth the foundation for psychology, with its complex analyses of consciousness, self-consciousness, and personality. Rank's commentary is not limited to beliefs about individual souls but includes ideas about group souls, sometimes encompassing nations or generations. Rank suggests that it is in expression of group beliefs that the idea of the soul attains its greatest power.

A Study of the Origin, Conceptual Evolution, and Nature of the Soul

Psychology and the Soul

Sigmund Freud hired Otto Rank as his secretary and funded Rank's PhD in literature at the University of Vienna. In 1910, at age 26, Rank published 'A Dream That Interprets Itself'. Freud could not praise the essay highly enough; impressed by Rank's erudition, Freud invited his protege to contribute two chapters, on poetry and myth, in 1914 to The Interpretation of Dreams. Thereafter, Rank's name would appear under Freud's on the title page of the foundational text of psychoanalysis for the next fifteen years. Grateful for Freud's generosity, Rank published a stream of articles and books advancing psychoanalytic thinking into almost every area of the arts and humanities, thus demonstrating to Freud's critics that the validity of psychoanalysis did not hinge solely on his autobiographical work The Interpretation of Dreams. Rank died in 1939 and his work fell out of favor until a renaissance of interest beginning in the 1970s. This is the first English translation of Rank's masterpiece of dream interpretation, originally published in 1910 as "Ein Traum, der sich selbst deutet" in the journal Jahrbuch fur Psychoanalytische und Psychopathologische Forschungen, 2(2): 465-540. It is accompanied by an in-depth introduction from editor Robert Kramer, the world's only Rankian psychologist. The book is essential reading for all psychoanalytic scholars, practitioners, and historians, and those interested in dream analysis.

A Dream That Interprets Itself

L'auteur fait dériver d'un rêve diurne adolescent le conte très répandu de l'exposition du héros à la naissance. Il parvient ainsi dans "Le mythe de la naissance du héros"à rendre évidentes les dynamiques d'un fantasme qui se réalise dans les histoires légendaires, mais aussi dans les délires paranoïaques. Dans "La légende de Lohengrin", il retrouve ce fantasme dans les romans de chevalerie.

Le mythe de la naissance du héros

(Mythos Series)

Nachdruck der Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 1926.

Psychonalytische Studien

Sexualität und Schuldgefühl

Sándor Ferenczi

The Development of Psycho-analysis

"Among the strictly scientific applications of analysis to literature, Rank's exhaustive work on the theme of incest easily takes the first place."--Sigmund Freud.

Fundamentals of a Psychology of Literary Creation

The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend

Hanns Sachs

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Otto Rank

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