SOURCE: “Creativity as the Central Concept in the Psychology of Otto Rank,” in Psychoanalysis, Creativity, and Literature: A French-American Inquiry, edited by Alan Roland, Columbia University Press, 1978, pp. 162-77.

In the following essay, originally published in 1976, Menaker argues that Rank's own struggle to cultivate his creative personality led to his emphasis in his work on artistic ingenuity.

It is unfortunate, yet probably inevitable, that Otto Rank, to the extent that he is known at all, is known primarily as a dissenter from Freudian psychoanalysis, and that his name is associated chiefly with his much misunderstood book, The Trauma of Birth. While it is true that he was first a disciple and then a dissenter, it would be a mistake to view Rank's divergencies from Freudian theory and from a Freudian way of thinking as just another splinter from the main stem of psychoanalytic doctrine. For if we study...