SOURCE: “Rank and Contemporary Social and Psychoanalytic Thought,” in Otto Rank: A Rediscovered Legacy, Columbia University Press, 1982, pp. 120-36.

In the following essay, Menaker examines Rank's role in contemporary studies.

Rank's profound philosophical intuition about the totality of human life, about man's dilemma over living with the consciousness of his mortality supersedes his psychology and his therapy. That intuition makes him, a man of our time—perhaps of all time. As the title of his last, posthumously published book, Beyond Psychology, suggests, he enlarged the framework of his concerns to include the very nature of being—psychologically within its social setting and in relationship to its cosmic dimension. This existential view placed the most basic issue—that of man's awareness of his finiteness—at the heart of the human task of adaptation.

In the current social climate, the task of adapting to the mortality-immortality issue is particularly difficult...