4                                E. James Lieberma7i

F.rnest Becker, Robert Jay Lifton and Irvin Yalom acknowledge
indebtedness to him. Jessie Taft and Virginia Robinson elaborated
his ideas at the Pennsylvania School of Social AVork. Rank lec¬
tured at Columbia at the invitation of sociologist William F. Og-
 

The University of Vienna about the time Rank received his Ph.D., 1912.
(Courccs\' of Museen derStadtWien)
 

burn. Dr. Marion Kenworthy, who played a major role at the
Columbia School of Social Work, was among the many American
psychiatrists analyzed by Rank. As therapist or mentor. Rank in¬
fluenced Ludwig Lewisohn, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, and other
artist and writers. He died after a brief illness in 1939 at the age
of fifty-five.

Psychoanalysis has not done justice to its own histoty. Despite
many biographies of Freud and other analysts, the role of Otto
Rank has been neither fully appreciated nor fairly presented. The
defenders of orthodoxy in psychoanalysis consigned Rank to
oblivion. They scorned his birth trauma theory although it led