Books like Otto Rank by Esther Menaker

Carl Jung’s final work, written before his 1961 death, offers a clear, accessible overview of his lifelong contributions to psychology, emphasizing the vital role of imaginative life in human individuality and societal understanding.

Traces the development of psychoanalysis through the work of Sigmund Freud and contrasts it with more recent schools of psychotherapy.

The Drama of the Gifted Child explains how repressed emotions from an abusive childhood create lifelong feelings of emptiness and alienation, offering readers a path to reclaim personal truth and essential needs.

A collection of five key writings by Otto Rank, including his early mythological studies, essays on art, education, and will therapy, offering a concise introduction to his psychoanalytic insights.

Once a leading disciple and confidant of Freud, Otto Rank parted company with the psychoanalytic community in the 1920s as his writings began focusing more on the cure of neuroses rather than on the seemingly interminable process of fostering a patient's in-depth understanding of them. A commitment to a more result-oriented form of psychoanalysis led to his publication of The Trauma of Birth (1924), in which Rank moves beyond the Oedipal complex to locate the strongest causes for repression in the child's love and fear of the mother. 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 his untimely death. 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. Rank, who was a practicing psychotherapist for part of his career, found that scientific research into the Oedipal complex and therapeutic improvement did not coincide. Preoccupation with the Oedipal complex tended to trap the individual in a tragically powerless state. By tracing repression to the failure to accept birth, the reluctance to let go of the mother, Rank discovered a useful way to help the patient accept his or her own difference within relationships and thereby discover the creativity to change.

The writing and ideas of Erik Erikson have had a remarkably lasting influence on our culture. Erikson's fascination with India and with Gandhi earned him the Pulitzer Prize for his book Gandhi's Truth and foreshadowed the contemporary West's growing interest in Eastern thought. His students at Harvard in the 1960s have gone on to great prominence - Carol Gilligan, Robert Coles, Mary Catherine Bateson, and Howard Gardner to name a few. Trained in Vienna by Sigmund and Anna Freud, Erikson came to depart from psychoanalytic orthodoxy in deeply innovative ways - insisting that social circumstances were no less important than the inner psyche in determining human personality.