SOURCE: “Otto Rank,” in Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory, Jason Aronson, 1979, pp. 132-71.

In the following essay, Stolorow and Atwood examine Rank's theories on narcissism in psychoanalysis and the ways in which his work in this area prefigured later trends in the field.

In recent years the problem of narcissism has increasingly moved into the limelight of psychoanalytic investigation. This is evidenced, for example, by the large number of articles on the subject appearing in psychoanalytic publications, and by the fact that in a recent poll Kohut's (1971) work on narcissism was rated among the most meaningful contributions to contemporary psychoanalysis (Goldberg 1974). The reasons for the current psychoanalytic focus on narcissism are at least twofold. First, advances in psychoanalytic understanding over the past twenty years or so have given analysts the conceptual and technical tools to deal effectively with the problems of narcissism and the narcissistic...