Otto Rank Critical Essay | Critical Review by Trigant Burrow

Critical Review by Trigant Burrow

SOURCE: “The World as Will,” in Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 4, No. 2, February, 1939, pp. 162-73.

In the following review, Burrow praises Rank's artistic approach to psychoanalysis despite the flaws he finds in Truth and Reality and Will Therapy.

I

The task of the reviewer is a precarious one. As with any social rôle to which one conforms, the pattern of performance is laid down for him in advance, so that before he knows it he is already off to a bad start. In reviewing a work on psychiatry, or a work that deals with the ineptitudes of human behavior, it is particularly salutary that one's own reactions be subsumed in the reckoning, that one take careful account of the biases and ineptitudes that too often characterize the attitude of the reviewer toward the work to be reviewed. Oscar Wilde frankly confessed that he could resist anything but temptation....
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