SOURCE: “Insight and Blindness: Visions of Rank,” in A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures by Otto Rank, edited by Robert Kramer, Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. 3-47.

In the following essay, Kramer surveys Rank's career, including his shortcomings and his legacy to his field.

At heart a poet and writer, Otto Rank took great pleasure in giving literary gifts to his beloved Professor, a past master of the German language. On May 6, 1923, as a gift for Freud's sixty-seventh birthday, Rank presented the father of psychoanalysis with his dreamy new manuscript, completed just days before: Das Trauma der Geburt. The manuscript was drawn from a diary in which he had been sketching “impressions from analytic sessions, in aphoristic form,” Rank would later reveal. “It was assembled piece by piece, as it were, like a mosaic” (Isakower 1924). Inlaid throughout the poetic work were a number of strange and shocking aphorisms...