Customer Reviews

Beyond Psychology

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Rank proves the truth of the thesis that a teacher has done his job when he becomes the student. This tour de force on Freudian psychological thought extends the bounds beyond anything that Freud, his teacher and mentor could have ever imagined himself.

Every sentence is lucid and compelling.

This book sparkles and speaks mostly to man's fears and irrationalities. But it does not try to exorcise or explan them away. For the first time a theory accepts them both as integral parts of the fabric of the human condition. The treatment of ideologies alone is worth the price of ten books, but there is more, a lot more: on creativity, social organization, human personality, etc. Ten stars!

The odd thing with both Freud & Lacan is that, having promoted the notion of the unconscious in all its vicissitudes & unknowability, they then proceed to map & double-guess it. The result, in short, a 'rule-book' for the unconscious.

Rank makes no such mistake ... he prods & weaves, essays & intuits, but never reduces the vagueries to maps, schemas or graphs ... on the contrary, Rank discerns & celebrates the paradoxical character of the godworm.

He's not an easy read, but a necessary one.

Rank's last book, the only one he wrote in English, was published two years after his untimely death in 1939. As his biographer (Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank), I paid it too little heed, as some informants interviewed 25 years ago felt that because the book was not quite finished, it might have been altered in the process of getting it published. I now doubt that. Like other reviewers I find it slow going but rich, deep, sensitive, and brilliant. It requires and deserves re-reading. Unfortunately Dover has let it go out of print, but it seems to be readily available used. Only 1,000 of the hardback were printed; the paperback appeared around 1958 (several different covers were used). Another important Rank book first became available in a full English translation in 1998: Psychology and the Soul: A Study of the Origin, Conceptual Evolution, and Nature of the Soul.

Rank is one of those psychologists/authors that addressed issues most others are too anxious to discuss, hence the reason, in my opinion, he is not as "popular" (in relative terms) as other psychologists.

At times, tough to understand, but definitely worth the read!

Otto Rank had a destiny that was far larger than trying to cure individuals living in social systems that produced dubious distinctions between what was the disease and how personality became a large factor in the triumph of Christianity as a system to make people want to feel wanted. As an intellectual, his lack of a system which was merely providing tools that only worked on a level adopted by American social workers instead of people making really big bucks makes him less well known now than some banks.

In Beyond Psychology (1941, 1958) by Otto Rank, what Flaubert called the "disease of perfection" is described as the moral evil of modern man. Anyone who feels inferior for losing a personality in an epidemic of human engineering brought about by the secular religion of democracy might be reminded of "a deep-rooted self-hatred in the Jew" described by Theodore Lessing. I, myself, might become known for hating myself for how often I tell people what they don't want to know.

In the beginning was the fable, which had some uses. The Dover paperback I bought of Beyond Psychology does not have an index, and I have only looked a few times for a page that called money a fantasy. American guys have been giving me plenty of reasons to despise anything that I might want out of life at this point. Rank ends with a lot of consideration of personality related to sex roles. You guys might not want to know that Otto Rank considered the Golden Calf "another mother-symbol, . . . a relic of the great Asiatic Mother-Goddess who had been replaced by Jehovah through the man Moses, in whom appears epitomized the transition from the mother-cult of ancient Egypt to the father-cult of monotheistic religion." Christianity brought about a woman's psychology "of wanting to be wanted. Such reversal in the expression of the will raises the question as to whether we are to see in it another perversity of human nature or a genuine expression of woman's natural self."

And I quote:

Since modern psychology
is not only masculine
but derived from our
neurotic type of man,
a great deal of its terminology
originated from a misinterpretation
of woman in terms of man's
sexual ideology.