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The Trauma of Birth

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The Dover edition, now out of print, contains an introduction by E. James Lieberman*, biographer of Otto Rank (_Acts of Will_) and co-translator of Rank's _Psychology and the Soul_(1998). This work marks the break between Rank and Freud; written in 1924, it established the mother-child relationship as the central focus in human development. People forget that Freud's psychology was father-centered. Some critics feel that Rank exaggerated the birth trauma in the physical sense, but his thesis is about separation and individuation, now mainstream concepts (cf. Mahler, Bowlby, Erikson). Freud initially praised the book as the best thing since the invention of psychoanalysis--but then he backed away; in 1926 Rank left Vienna for Paris and then New York.
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*This Introduction is not part of the 2010 reprint.

This little book has big ideas about our need to merge and the various ways we spend our lives defending against that original loss and its infinite repetitions throughout life. Rank, shunned by Freud, was a thinker of the top order, popularized by the brilliant Ernest Becker in the 70s, and well worth reading in his original form.