Rollo May Research Articles

The suffering of personality: Existential pain and political correctness

Internationally renowned for his contributions to 20th-century psychology and psychotherapy, Rollo May returned to Michigan State University during the “dirty thirties” after a period of teaching a...

Become Who You Are: Integrating the Conceptions of Will and Being in the Psychotherapeutic Theory of Rollo May

This article discusses the essential foundation of Rollo May's unique approach to psychotherapy. Emphasis is placed on exploring and revealing the most basic elements that can be said to constitute the center of May's psychotherapeutic theory. This center exhibits a fundamental concern with the reality of an individual's being, that is, with empowering the individual to experience the reality of his or her being in a deeper and more authentic way. Such empowerment relies on and engages the dynamic processes of freedom and will, which make it possible for an individual to confront and actualize his or her inner potentialities for living. The heart of the therapeutic endeavor, then, is the supportive challenge to experience the depths of one's existence, to become who one truly is. The article concludes with an emphasis on May's concept of self-affirmation, a revolutionary way of existing in the world involving individual, cultural, and global implications for positive transformation.

Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger, Editors. Existence. New York: Basic Books, 1958

Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger, Editors. Existence. New York: Basic Books, 1958

Rollo May (Ed.), Existential psychology. New York: Random House, 1961. 126 pages

Rollo May (Ed.), Existential psychology. New York: Random House, 1961. 126 pages

Sacred dialectic: The centrality of paradox in the worldview of Rollo May.

This article explores the fundamental significance of paradox to the worldview of Rollo May. The theme and concept of paradox is seen as constituting the essence of his thought and is believed to have strongly influenced his conception of the human psyche, health and dysfunction, and socio-cultural dynamics. Through an analysis of primary sources in May's writings, it is demonstrated that his philosophical worldview is most accurately represented by the principle of paradox, or dialectic. Specifically, both the basic characteristics of this principle, as well as its many manifestations in the form of particular paradoxes, are discussed. This discussion emphasizes the value of paradox to May's worldview and its role in shaping his critique of psychology and culture. The article concludes with an emphasis on the importance of May's view of paradox as a vital contribution to the field of psychology and broader culture, as well as its specific applicability to our own individual struggles to achieve integrati...

The Courage To Create Rollo May: The Courage To Be Paul Tillich

This article considers the concepts of courage and creativity in the words of three late-20th-century theologians: Paul Tillich and Rollo May, who focused on psychology, and Reverend Al Carmines, who blended his creative self into his ministry, originating the avant-garde performing arts world of the 1960s and 1970s.

Disrupted conventions or diseased selves: The relationship between philosophical and psychotherapeutic forms of questioning

Abstract This paper describes the relationship between modernist psychotherapeutic and philosophical forms of “dis-ease.” It shows how modernist psychotherapeutic forms of disease are focused around disturbances of the self whereas philosophical forms of dis-ease are focused around disturbances in the context or conventions in which the self is situated; psychotherapeutic forms of dis-ease are concerned with “means” while philosophical forms are concerned with ends, in modernist psychotherapy it is assumed that patients know what they value but are blocked by internal obstacles from realizing their values while in philosophical counseling it is the very values themselves which are in question. Philosophical counseling provides a framework in which individuals can explore the values that are in question. Examples embedded in the philosophies of Plato, Heidegger, Kuhn, and Gellner are used to develop the notion of philosophical counseling and examples from the writing of Rollo May, Joel Kovel, and Christoph...

Tilting the balance: the first long-term medium secure unit in the NHS in England and Wales

Rollo May Ward, a long-term medium secure facility integrated within the West London Mental Health National Health Service (NHS) Trust, is the first dedicated long-term NHS medium secure unit to have opened in England. It caters for a group of men with complex clinical needs and risk assessment issues who had previously been inappropriately detained within high secure services owing to a lack of suitable, less secure placement facilities. We describe the background to the development of the long-term medium secure service, the referral and assessment processes, the structure of the ward and the therapeutic programmes available to patients. We also outline the characteristics of the first 21 patients to be admitted to the ward and offer advice for similar future developments.

Biology and awe: Psychology's critical juncture.

Psychology stands at a crossroads. Even more than in the time of Rollo May, psychology faces a dilemma of alarming moral and scientific proportions. On the one hand, psychology is about to become a biologism. This is a discipline-led by the high tech, consumerist model for living-that emphasizes measurement, materialism, and efficiency. On the other hand, psychology still has a chance-mainly through humanistic and depth orientations-to be a vibrant discipline. The question is, will we take this path to become the queen of the sciences, as Nietzsche put it, or will we jeopardize 5,000 years of arts and humanities, centuries of depth analyses, and decades of awe-inspired practice. In this article, which echoes the spirit of my great friend and mentor, Rollo May, as well as my new book, Rediscovery of Awe, I will outline the stakes in this dilemma, the players involved-from biopsychology to humanism-and an alternative, conciliatory vision that I call awe-based psychology. The dilemma we face today is w...

Self-Awareness and Constructive Functioning: Revisiting “the Human Dilemma”

Self-awareness—the capacity to focus attention on oneself, and thus to self-evaluate—has a bad reputation in social-clinical psychology because of its ties to negative affect, depression, suicide, and dysfunction. Using Rollo May's (1967) analysis of “the human dilemma,” we outline self-awareness's beneficial contributions to psychological functioning. Without self-awareness, people could not take the perspectives of others, exercise self-control, produce creative accomplishments, or experience pride and high self-esteem. Research suggests that the positive and negative facets of self-awareness are reconciled when people have reasonable self-standards and when they are optimistic about meeting their standards.

Otto Rank, 1884-1939.

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Images in PsychiatryFull AccessOtto Rank, 1884–1939E. James Lieberman, M.D.E. James LiebermanSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:1 Jan 2003https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.160.1.32AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Viennese-American psychologist Otto Rank, Sigmund Freud’s protégé, colleague, and prescient critic, had considerable influence on American psychiatry (1–4). Secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society from 1906, at age 22, and Freud’s closest associate for the next 18 years, Rank was a prolific and influential psychoanalytic author in the formative years of the movement. His scope included art, music, literature, anthropology, history, science, and philosophy.A polymath from a humble background, Rank finished trade school as a locksmith while reading voraciously. Through Alfred Adler, his family doctor, he met Freud, who employed him and sent him to the University of Vienna, where he got his Ph.D. in 1912. (Freud discouraged going to medical school.) By then Rank had published books on art, mythology, incest, and the Lohengrin saga. After World War I he directed training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute and worked with a number of Americans there. Rank visited the United States in 1924, addressing the American Psychoanalytic Association, which made him an honorary member. But his work with Sandor Ferenczi on a more active psychotherapeutic technique and his controversial book The Trauma of Birth (1924) brought criticism from conservative Freudians. Rank developed a more egalitarian psychotherapy focused on the here-and-now, real relationships, conscious mind, and will, rather than past history, transference, unconscious process, and wish. His ideas on the mother-child relationship and interpersonal psychotherapy are mainstream now, but in 1926 they caused the final break with Freud.Rank then set up practice in Paris, visiting New York regularly and finally moving there in 1935. Ousted by the psychoanalytic establishment, Rank lectured widely, taught, and practiced psychotherapy in New York. (His first wife, Beata, a lay analyst specializing in children, became a training analyst in Boston, where she died in 1967.) Among his patients and/or seminar students were psychiatrists Marion Kenworthy, Frankwood Williams, Martin Peck, and George Wilbur. Rank’s post-Freudian writings include Psychology and the Soul (1930),Art and Artist (1932),Modern Education (1932),Will Therapy (1936), and Truth and Reality (1936). In October 1939, divorced and remarried, planning to become a citizen and move to California, Rank died of a reaction to sulfonamide at age 55, a month after Freud.Otto Rank loved his new country, and Mark Twain had become his favorite author, from whom he adopted the nickname “Huck.” Out of favor while analysis was dominant in American psychiatry, Rank came to the attention of a wider public in the writings of Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death [1973]) and Anais Nin. His influence on social work came through the Pennsylvania School, and on psychology through such writers as Paul Goodman, Rollo May, and Esther Menaker. Psychiatrists who acknowledge Rank’s importance in their writings include Franz Alexander, Frederick Allen, Clara Thompson, Judd Marmor, Robert Jay Lifton, Carl Whitaker, and Irvin Yalom.Address reprint requests to Dr. Lieberman, 3900 Northampton St., N.W., Washington, DC 20015-2951; [email protected] (e-mail). Otto Rank

Psychology licensing exam: An alternative.

Abstract Rollo May and the author constructed an alternative psychology licensing exam putting more focus on the humanities and their relevance for psychology. Colleagues are invited to take the exam, and if they fail, to turn in their licenses.

Religion and psychiatry.

When Dr. Harding first notified me that the committee on psychiatry and religion had honored me with this wonderful award I experienced an onslaught of feelings, primarily great pleasure and also pride at being in the company of former recipients, all of them thinkers I have much admired. I was particularly delighted to learn that the first recipient of the Oscar Pfister prize was one of my mentors, Jerome Frank, whom I am pleased to inform you is, at the age of 93, as thoughtful, curious, and coherent as ever. But there were also other feelings-more complicated, quirky, dark, difficult to express. Religion? Me? There must be some mistake. Hence, my first words of reply to Dr. Harding were: Are you sure. You know I regard myself as a practicing atheist? His immediate response to me was: We believe that you've dedicated yourself to religious questions. graciousness of his reply disarmed me and brought to mind many conversations with my former therapist and, later, my dear friend, Rollo May, who insisted on regarding my textbook, Existential Psychotherapy, as a religious book. I remember, too, that Lou Salome referred to Nietzsche as a religious thinker with an antireligion perspective. My talk today will focus on the issues raised by these dissonant feelings and especially on some of the existential therapeutic issues that, as Dr. Harding points out, are often considered to be religious in nature. I'll also sketch out some comparisons between existential psychotherapy and religious consolation. I believe these two approaches have a complex, strained relationship. In a sense, they are cousins with the same ancestors and concerns: they share the common mission of ministering to the intrinsic despair of the human condition. Sometimes they share common methods-the one-to-one relationship, the mode of confession, of inner scrutiny, of forgiveness of others and self. In fact, more and more as I've grown older, I consider psychotherapy as a calling, not as a profession. And yet, still, it is true that the core beliefs and basic practical approaches of psychotherapy and religious consolation are often antipodal. It is true that throughout history, or at least from the first to the mid-17th century, the thinkers who were most concerned about issues of existence were rooted in the religious wisdom traditions-not necessarily that their insights emanated from fundamental religious beliefs but that the religious institutions provided the sole arena which promoted and supported such intellectual activity. One can delineate both positive and negative aspects to this phenomenon: positive in that religious institutions encouraged and sponsored (indeed, for many centuries, were the sole sponsors of) philosophical inquiry, negative in that religious institutions often restricted what could be thought and which problems could be examined. Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil: Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant has grown. Though such perspectivism runs the risk (which Nietzsche was delighted to take) of denying the possibility of any fixed truth, still I take his words seriously and I'll sketch in the origins of my own religious point of view and intellectual positions. My early religious training was a pedagogical disaster-my family's orthodox Jewish synagogue was cloaked in rigid unyielding, authoritarianism which I found highly distasteful. In the long run, that was decisive for me because I lost any possibility of faith early in life. Schopenhauer reminds us that religious faith, if it is to thrive, has to be planted and take root in childhood. In his words, The capacity for faith is at its strongest in childhood; which is why religions apply themselves before all else to getting those tender years into their possession. …

The Printed Pulpit: On Harry C. Meserve

The pulpit may be the most influential platform of communication ever de signed. Certainly the sermon is among the strongest expressions of the verbal arts. However, preachers also run the risk of exhausting their congregations in a myriad of ways. Length is probably the best example. As the adage claims, "The mind can only absorb as much as the seat can endure." Harry Meserve was an effective preacher. He knew how to edit himself. Consequently, his message stuck, lingering as a mental echo. In fact, I first heard his name mentioned in the sermon preached at my ordination to the priesthood. The preacher was The Rev. Thomas O. Edmunds, a professor at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. Tom's sermon included several long quotations from one of Dr. Meserve's which was published in an anthology, Sermons from an Ecumenical Pulpit. As an ordination present Tbm also gave me a year's subscription to the Journal of Religion and Health. Harry of course was the editor and eventually a very influential figure in my career. Harry Chamberlain Meserve died two years ago in Bar Harbor, Maine. He was 86 years old and his life was well-lived. He was a brilliant thinker, a superb writer and a wonderful human being. He was also a dear friend and a mentor to many, myself included. Dr. Meserve grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Phillip's Academy Andover, Haverford College, and Harvard Divinity School. He received an honorary doctorate from Meadville Theologi cal Seminary and served several Unitarian churches during his sixty years of ministry. He was also the Director of Programs for the Academy of Religion and Mental Health and the founding editor of its quarterly, the Journal of Religion and Health. He encouraged a host of prominent people to contribute to the Journal, including Arnold Toynbee, Paul Tillich, Gordon Allport, Ira Progoff, Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, Kenneth B. Clark, Ramsey Clark, and Seward Hiltner.

Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology: A Historical and Biographical Sourcebook

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book Forum: PsychotherapiesFull AccessHumanistic and Transpersonal Psychology: A Historical and Biographical SourcebookTERRY A. TRAVIS, M.D., TERRY A. TRAVISSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Springfield, Ill.Published Online:1 Apr 2001https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.158.4.667-aAboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail This book is exactly what the title says it is. Well written, thorough, and enlightening, it provides extensive references and documents the history of the humanistic psychology movement and the people involved in its development, ongoing research, and clinical application. A definition of humanistic psychology and its goals is provided in the introduction:Humanistic psychology began as a bold movement of creative individuals who set out deliberately to remake American psychology in the image of a fully alive and aware human being.…Humanistic psychologists criticize the emphasis of scientific psychology on the measurement, prediction, and control of behavior and protest the exclusion from psychological investigation of such basic aspects of humanness as consciousness, value, creativity, freedom, will, love, and spirit.The first 14 chapters provide an overview, beginning with a chapter on the historical and scientific background of humanistic psychology. The major theorists and schools are discussed, including Carl Rogers’s person-centered therapy, Gestalt therapy, body therapies, existential psychology, feminist psychology, and mind-body medicine. These chapters present the areas in which these approaches overlap as well as their similarities and differences. In addition, the Christian and transpersonal psychologies are well represented and placed in perspective. Throughout these chapters runs a theme of critiquing each approach and discussing research that is ongoing or needed. These chapters provide clarification of the theory behind the development and continuation of each approach to humanity at its best. The last two chapters present a cogent rationale for the continuation of these approaches. There is a excellent balance between pointing out the strengths and the limitations of each theory, supporting each comment with the literature.The last 16 chapters are in a section titled Biographical and Critical Essays on Central Figures in Humanistic Psychology and Transpersonal Psychology. These chapters are fascinating to read because the subjects are presented with all their warts and bumps as well as their genius, creativity, and individuality. This makes for fascinating reading that leads to reflection and considered thought. The figures are a fascinating and varied group: Diana Baumrind, James F.T. Bugental, Moshe Feldenkrais, Erich Fromm, Amedeo Giorgi, William James, Sidney Jourard, Ronald Laing, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Laura Perls, Carl Rogers, Ida P. Rolf, Erwin Straus, and Ken Wilber. Taken as a whole, these chapters provide an intimate glimpse into the lives and professional hopes of bright creative thinkers and their interactions with and effects on each other as the field of humanistic psychology developed to the present day.I feel that this book is an excellent resource for anyone who works with people and is given the privilege of assisting them reach their potential, whether as therapist, counselor, priest, or consultant.Edited by Donald Moss. Westport, Conn., Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999, 457 pp., $95.00. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 158Issue 4 April 2001Pages 667-a-668 Metrics History Published online 1 April 2001 Published in print 1 April 2001

“What is Man, Psychologist, that Thou Art So Unmindful of him?”: Henry A. Murray on the Historical Relation between Classical Personality Theory and Humanistic Psychology

A review is presented of the humanistic movement in American psychology, focusing on recent historical reconstruction of the Old Saybrook Conference, held in November 1964. At that conference, senior academic personality theorists such as Gordon Allport, Henry A. Murray, Gardner Murphy, and George Kelly convened with the new voices of the humanistic movement, including Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, James Bugental, and Charlotte Bühler, to self-consciously legitimize humanistic psychology as a viable form of intellectual discourse within academic psychology. This article focuses on the historical reconstruction of the previously lost and unpublished keynote address delivered by Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray. In this address, Murray excoriates the destructive reductionism of the laboratory experimentalists, lays out the lines of a definitive historical relationship between classical personality theory and the new humanistic psychology, and defines eight areas to be developed to solidify the movement at the leading edge of American psychology.

Outcomes of an existential-humanistic psychotherapy: A tribute to Rollo May.

Outcomes of an existential-humanistic psychotherapy: A tribute to Rollo May.

Anthropos and Existence: Gnostic Parallels in the Early Wrtings of Rollo May

A case is made for the influence of archetypal structures on May's preexistential orientation. Early theological, anthropological, and depth psychological affiliations are also considered. It is suggested that May's initial attempts at founding a "science of humanity" and his first conception of the self emerge from these early affiliations and reveal an affinity for Gnostic speculation on Anthropos. This concept has been interpreted by Elaine Pagels, Carl Jung, and others to indicate humanity or self: the archetypal spiritual essence of the human being. The above thinkers additionally suggest that the Gnostics were not only passionate religious scholars interested in redemption, via knowledge of the heart, but also early depth psychologists and humanitarians. It is argued that many Gnostic concepts are inherently existential and that certain Gnostic conceptualizations of existence illuminate May's foundational theoretical assertions. The archetype of Anthropos is thus formative for May's development as a humanist, psychoanalyst, and existentially oriented depth psychologist.

"To Sleep, Perchance to Dream": Sleeping Beauties and Wide-Awake Plain Janes in the Stories of Jane Yolen

"To Sleep, Perchance to Dream":Sleeping Beauties and Wide-Awake Plain Janes in the Stories of Jane Yolen Tina L. Hanlon (bio) The power of the tales is that they are . . . as evocative, as sensual, as many-faceted, as disturbing, as slippery as dreams. They offer a moral, they speak to the human condition, but it is not always the condition or the moral one immediately sees. —Yolen, Touch Magic After at least twenty-five years of intense debate, there is still much disagreement about how to interpret gender roles in fairy tales. Folklorists and fairy-tale historians have provided overwhelming evidence that the tales reflect the cultural biases of the societies in which they are retold and that they affect children and adults in complex ways. Marina Warner and Maria Tatar have revealed how easily misogynist tellers of the past exploited "the way in which a few quick strokes can reorient a story" to serve the moralist's purpose (Tatar 101). Throughout this century fairy tales have been neglected, condemned as escapist or satanic or useless, and trivialized through shallow caricatures and modernizations by new breeds of moralists and realists. In the 1970s, critics such as Marcia Lieberman and Madonna Kolbenschlag drew attention to the preponderance of passive and victimized female characters in the best-known fairy tales, warned us about their pervasive effects on the acculturation of women, and advised us to kiss these detrimental influences good-bye. Yet their hold on our psyches is so powerful that allusions to fairy tales permeate popular culture, as well as many studies in the fields of folklore, the arts, and the social sciences. While a storytelling revival has grown in recent decades, psychoanalytical critics such as Bruno Bettelheim and, more recently, Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Rollo May have emphasized the therapeutic value of folk tales and myths, which, like dreams, reflect symbolically our subconscious fears and desires. Thus, although the motif of the sleeping beauty appears to be one of the most blatantly sexist images in fairy-tale traditions—the innocent, passive victim [End Page 140] waiting for just the right prince to rescue her—a multitude of diverse voices invites us to reconsider the significance of the old tales. Present writers such as Jane Yolen continue to portray images of sleeping beauties in a variety of ways: retelling the classic tales as well as satirizing them and reviving more obscure and unfamiliar old tales, creating new tales that preserve the familiar motifs and magical atmosphere of the old "wonder tales," and writing startling new stories using a variety of experimental techniques to combine fairytale motifs with realistic contemporary and historical themes. Yolen's work is remarkable because, since the early 1960s, she has employed all these approaches in many books for children and adults that feature the adventures of strong women without severing their ties to the ancient fairy-tale realm of magic and dreams. She weaves traditional motifs into the fabric of her tales so persistently and intricately that we recognize familiar patterns even as we are startled and delighted by amazing original ones. As she has written, "There is an eclecticism to modern telling. Stories lean on stories, art on art. I can only trace my own sources so far before I realize that, in the end, it is the story that matters, not the parts: the tapestry of the tale and not the individual threads" (Tales of Wonder xi-xii). In a number of her stories, interwoven images of shadow and light, sleep and dreams, briars and roses, spinning wheels and golden threads, forests and castle towers, hair and fur, fairies and mortals create so many subtle connections that we never lose sight of the tapestry—although it is wondrously complex—while we trace the individual threads. Although Yolen's picture book The Sleeping Beauty has an unusual history in her career, its appearance in 1986 allows us to compare her retelling of the Grimm Brothers' "Briar Rose" with the sleeping beauties and wide-awake Plain Janes she created before and afterwards in her parodies of classic tales, her more original fairy tales, and her very innovative contemporary stories for older readers, including the novel Briar...

A psychology of difference: the American lectures

Otto Rank, A Psychology of Difference: The American Lectures. Selected, Edited, and Introduced by Robert Kramer with a foreword by Rollo May. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-691-04470-8. Separation, Will, and Creativity: The Wisdom of Otto Rank by Esther Menaker. Edited by Claude Barbre. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996. ISBN 1-56-821-802-8. The writings of Otto Rank (1884-1939) are in the midst of a rebirth. Rank-artist, poet, psychotherapist, philosopher, mythologist, and educator-was a leading disciple and confidant of Freud and the first lay psychoanalyst. Banished as a dissident from the inner circle of psychoanalysis in the 1920's, Rank was excommunicated like Adler and Jung before him. Though largely unacknowledged, Rank is a forerunner of ego psychology, object-relations theory, interpersonal psychotherapy, existential psychology, and Rogers' client-centered approach. The break with Freud was Rank's great turning point. In 1924 Rank transcended Freudian ideology in two bodks-The Development of Psychoanalysis (Ferenczi & Rank, 1924/1956) and The Trauma of Birth (1924/1952). He left psychoanalysis in order to help clients, having become disillusioned by endless analyses and therapeutic ideology. Writing now as a philosopher and metaphysician, Rank emphasized each individual's struggle to become separate, whole, creative. Rank emigrated from Vienna to Paris in 1926, where stayed until 1934 and treated artists such as Anais Nin and Henry Miller. He moved permanently to the U.S. in 1935. Rank's tragic death came in 1939 from an unexpected reaction to medication, only one month after Freud's physician-assisted death from morphine. Rank's original writings, be forewarned, are notoriously difficult. Rollo May (1950/1977) cautioned that Rank's terminology and dualistic mode of thought are uncongenial (p. 132), while Ernest Becker (1973) characterized Rank's work as a confusion of insights, so rich and diffuse that he is inaccessible to the general (p. xii). Anais Nin (1967) insisted that these writings don't do justice to his ideas, and admitted that Rank himself had tried to persuade her to rewrite his books (p. 16). It is not surprising, then, that Irvin Yalom (1980) has decried the wretched translations that are now almost mercifully out of print (p. 293). So, given the considerable learning curve, why bother with these works? Because Rank's thought has deep implications for development of the social sciences (Becker, 1973, p. xii-xiv). Like travel guides in unfamiliar territory, capable interpreters like Menaker and Kramer help us on our way. Fortunately, Esther Menaker's (1996) Separation, will, and creativity: The wisdom of Otto Rank makes this work approachable. Menaker, ninety, has nearly seventy years of experience as a psychotherapist and analyst. Having studied under professor Jesse Taft (the Rankian analysand, biographer, and translator), Menaker later traveled to Vienna in order to train with Anna Freud. For decades, Menaker has written and lectured about Rank, providing much-needed interpretation and explanation. Separation, comprised of thirteeen chapters, is broad in scope, ranging from an impassioned pilgrimage to view Rank's teenage diary to thoughtful discussions of the philosophy of science. Also included are seven case histories from Menaker's own private practice, intended to illustrate Rankian principles. All this material, even the personal and anecdotal, assists the reader in embracing the ever-difficult Rank. Rank was far ahead of his time, argues Menaker, and his thinking reflects the scientific ethos of our own time. She explains that Rank was a dialectic thinker, one who offered dualistic descriptions of psychological processes. Discussions are dedicated, therefore, to the life fear/death fear, the wish to differentiate/wish to merge, and the causality principle/will principle. Menaker (1996) is at her best in sorting out thorny technical concepts. …